What Shikargah is

Shikargah is Persian for the hunting ground: the reserved forest where a king's hunt unfolded. In the courts of Persia and Mughal India the hunt was never only sport. It was statecraft performed outdoors. The hunting carpets of Safavid Persia and the Mughal miniatures both recorded it.

When that world reached the looms of Banaras, it entered the kimkhwabs, the heavy gold-figured brocades woven for courts. There the shikargah was counted among the most prized and most demanding of designs.

Shikargah is a pattern, not a weave. It names what is drawn. How the pattern entered the cloth is a separate, honest question, with a separate, honest price.

How to recognise a Shikargah

Read it the way it was composed.

Count the species first. A fine Shikargah is a census: deer, elephant, horse, tiger, peacock, parrot, and human figures threaded among them.

Choose one chase and follow it. Hunter and hunted are placed in relation, so the scene has direction, a current of movement running through the foliage.

Look for meena: the coloured silk inside the animals' bodies. It is what makes a deer step forward out of the gold.

Then turn it over, and let the reverse tell you how all this life was made.

Some pieces here carry the full hunt across a Jangla field. Others carry its birds alone, parrots set as butis.

Time on the loom

A flower forgives the loom. A slightly squared rose is still a rose. An animal forgives nothing. The arc of a leaping deer's back, the taper of a horse's leg at full stride: these are curves persuaded out of a grid of straight intersections, thread by thread.

Before any weaving, the naqsha must be drawn and translated so the loom remembers creatures, not just a lattice. Each figure is placed so the scene reads as pursuit, not a procession of stamps.

Woven kadhua, every animal is worked separately and completely in its own place before the weaver moves on. Each product page states that piece's own time on the loom.

How Shikargah differs from Jangla and Kimkhab

Shikargah grows from the same foliage as the Jangla. A Jangla is the garden. A Shikargah is the garden, inhabited. The Jangla grows. The Shikargah moves.

Kimkhab names a class of cloth, the heaviest Banaras brocade, defined by how much of its ground is zari. Shikargah names a design. The two met in history, when the hunt was woven into the old kimkhwabs. Today a Shikargah can be woven on many grounds.

Our Shikargah pieces are on katan silk, and most are woven kadhua. Ask of any piece whether the figures are kadhua or cutwork, and which zari they carry. On a pattern with inhabitants, those answers matter more than usual.

How to wear and care for a Shikargah

A Shikargah is the saree of the woman who collects. It is chosen for presence rather than protocol, and worn to an occasion rather than at its centre. A Jangla presides over an evening. A Shikargah arrives with a story already running across it. Keep jewellery quiet; the animals are the ornament.

Dry clean only. Wrap it in soft muslin and keep it in a dry place. Keep perfume off the zari. Open it out every few months.

We work with tested zari and name it plainly.