Persia is not a neighbour of Banaras. Persia is a parent. Almost everything on a Banarasi that isn’t Indian came from here — including, if we are honest, the words we use to describe it.
✨ Fun fact: Listen to a Banaras weaver at work and much of what you hear is Persian. Naqsha, the design. Naqshband, the man who ties it onto the loom. Zari, from zar, gold. Kalga. Buti. Jaal. The vocabulary of our loom is largely a Persian one.
The court at Isfahan
Shah Abbas I (reigned 1588–1629) moved his capital to Isfahan and built at its heart a great square he called Naqsh-e Jahan — “the Image of the World.” Naqsh: pattern, design, image. The same word a Banaras weaver uses for the graph pinned above his loom. A shah who names his capital square after a pattern is telling you what he values.
He meant it. Abbas took silk into his own hands, making it a royal monopoly and running the export trade to Europe himself, and he kept karkhanas — royal workshops — for weaving, carpets, bookbinding and painting. And what those looms produced was unlike anything else in the Islamic world: Persian silks are figural. Where the Ottomans wove tulips and abstractions, the Safavids wove people — lovers leaning together, a hunter, a boy with a wine cup, a scene from a poem, repeating quietly across a length of cloth.
Here too the cloth was a currency of favour: a khil’at, a robe of honour, laid across the shoulders of a man the shah wished to raise. It is the same custom we met in Ottoman Istanbul and in Bukhara — and the same one that carried Banarasi brocade across Mughal India.
Ghiyath — the weaver who signed his cloth
And now our favourite fact in this entire series.
In sixteenth-century Yazd there worked a silk designer so celebrated that he signed his fabrics — wove his own name, Ghiyath, into the cloth, the way a painter signs a canvas. Not a workshop mark. A signature. A weaver famous enough that people wanted to know whose hand it was.
And his professional title, the word that described what he did for a living, was naqshband. The pattern-binder.
It is the exact word, the exact job, that sits at the heart of every Banarasi we make — the man who takes the design and ties it into the loom in cords. We wrote about him here, never imagining we would find him, under his own name, in Safavid Yazd.
The Persian carpet, and a man called Maqsud
The most famous carpet on earth is the Ardabil Carpet, finished around 1539–40 for the shrine of Shaykh Safi al-Din. It is so large and so extraordinary that it now exists in two places at once: one carpet at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, its companion at LACMA in Los Angeles.
Woven into it, near the end, is an inscription: a couplet of poetry, and then a line naming the man responsible — the work of the servant of the threshold, Maqsud of Kashan. In 1540, a carpet weaver put his name in his carpet. We know almost nothing else about him. We know his name.
The great carpet cities — Kashan, Kerman, Tabriz, Isfahan — each had a voice, and Persian carpets remain the standard by which every other knotted rug on earth is quietly judged.
The boteh — where the paisley came from
One small shape has done more travelling than any of us. The Persian boteh — a bud, a shrub, a curling seed with its tip bent over — moved east into the shawls of Kashmir, and from there to Britain, where the mills of a Scottish town called Paisley copied it by the mile and accidentally gave it the name the whole world now uses.
It came to us, too. On a Banarasi it is the kalga, or the ambi, the mango. So the paisley on a Western cushion, the kalga on a Banarasi border and the boteh on a Safavid silk are all, quite literally, the same seed. You can follow it through our guide to Banarasi motifs.
The road, and the traffic on it
Persia sat in the middle of everything, and everything passed through.
Chinese silk came west. Persian cobalt went east — the blue in Chinese blue-and-white porcelain was, for a long time, a Persian mineral, as we mention in The Crafts of China. Persian designers, poets and weavers came south into India with the Mughals, and Persian remained the language of the Mughal court for centuries.
And it went the other way too. Look again at the jacket at the top of this page: Indian cloth, Iranian tailoring. The road was never one-way.
The painters of Isfahan
Behzad, whom we met in Timurid Herat, ended his career running the royal library at Tabriz. Sultan Muhammad painted the Shahnameh made for Shah Tahmasp — one of the most magnificent illustrated books ever produced anywhere.
But the painter of the age is Reza Abbasi (c. 1565–1635), Shah Abbas’s own artist. He drew languid youths and courtiers with a line so relaxed it looks careless and is not — and in doing so he left us the finest record that exists of what Safavid Iran actually wore: the sashes, the turbans, the figured coats. Tehran named a museum after him.
Where to see it
- Carpet Museum of Iran, Tehran — exactly what it says, and magnificent.
- Reza Abbasi Museum, Tehran — miniatures, metalwork, textiles.
- National Museum of Iran, Tehran.
- Naqsh-e Jahan Square and the Chehel Sotoun palace, Isfahan — where the murals still show the court in its silks.
- The Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and LACMA, Los Angeles — which hold the two Ardabil carpets between them. The Met and the Louvre have superb Safavid silks.
The thread we love
A square named after a pattern. A weaver who signed his silk. A seed that became a paisley. When we sit at a Banaras loom and someone says naqsha, we are speaking, without thinking about it, the language of Isfahan. Explore our Brocade Fabric collection.
Frequently asked questions
How is Persia connected to the Banarasi saree?
Deeply. The Mughals brought Persian designers, weavers and vocabulary into India, and much of the Banarasi design language — naqsha, naqshband, zari, kalga, buti, jaal — is Persian in origin.
What is a boteh?
The Persian bud or seed motif, with its characteristic bent tip. It travelled into Kashmir shawls and then to Britain, where the town of Paisley copied it so prolifically that the motif took the town’s name. In India it is the kalga or ambi.
What makes Safavid silk different?
It is figural. Persian weavers put people into their cloth — lovers, hunters, courtiers, scenes from poetry — where most other Islamic weaving traditions stayed with flowers and geometry.
What is the Ardabil Carpet?
A Persian carpet of 1539–40, made for the shrine at Ardabil, and among the most celebrated textiles in the world. It is inscribed with a couplet and the name of its maker, Maqsud of Kashan. One carpet is at the V&A in London and its companion at LACMA in Los Angeles.
Who was Reza Abbasi?
The leading painter of Shah Abbas’s court in Isfahan (c. 1565–1635), whose drawings of youths and courtiers are our best surviving record of Safavid dress. Tehran’s Reza Abbasi Museum is named after him.
Sources & further reading
On Safavid silk, the Persian carpet and the painting of Isfahan, see the open-access collections and scholarship of the Victoria & Albert Museum (which holds the Ardabil Carpet and publishes extensively on it), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée du Louvre and the Textile Museum at George Washington University.
More from Khinkhwab Diaries: the naqshband · Banarasi motifs · the crafts of Uzbekistan.
