Danny Mehta is displaying his collection of tribal carpets, dating from the mid 19th to mid 20th century, at an ongoing exhibition. He tells Shrabasti Mallik that his love for carpets began when his mother-in-law gifted two carpets on his wedding
You will find stories everywhere — in books, parchments of paper, history and mythology. Before the written word people told stories by carving stone and by weaving. Carpets tell beautiful stories — stories of their origin, mythology, religious beliefs and many more.
Bangalore based Danny Mehta is a carpet enthusiast. He loves to collect tribal carpets from Persia (modern day Iran), Anatolia (Turkey), the Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Dagestan), Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Krygyzstan, Turkmenistan) and various Kurdish enclaves. He has displayed it in an exhibition called Carpet Stories at IIC. “The carpets dates from the mid 19th to mid 20th century and include works by ethnic groups including the Qashqai, luri, Bakhtiari, Khamesh, Afshar, Shahsavan, Turkic, Baluch and Kurds. Many of these tribes were nomadic in the old days and migrated for climactic reasons, so the weavings they produced are a fantastic potpouri of many diverse ethnicities, tribal lifestyle and indigenous customs,” Mehta said.
His love with carpets started in a unique way. His mother-in-law presented him two carpets during his wedding and since then he had developed a fondness towards them. He describes this hobby as his “honest midlife crisis.” The single common theme that runs through each carpet in Danny’s collection is the search for “perfect imperfection.” He explained, “These carpets were woven by hand by women in their spare time. They had no set pattern and they weaved from their imagination so, they are not always exactly aligned or equal. That’s why they are slightly imperfect but that’s the beauty of the craft.”
Contrary to modern city weavings, tribal carpets were typically woven or around the tent or in small village workshops on simple makeshift icons. Seasonal migrants often created the need to dismantle loom containing partly woven carpet at the beginning of a journey, at the end of which the loom would be reassembled to resume and complete the weaving.
Carpets tell stories, he told us. There are eagles, horses, children and also the Cross of Christ. “They were symbolic, too, and were also used to ward off evil,” he said, pointing out to the eagle motifs in one of the carpets. His collection is quite vast and he pointed out that the world of carpets in a vast field and believes that the more you learn about it, the less you know.
The only thing that bothers this collector is the fact that carpet weaving is either dying or is already dead. “It was an entire process involving every member of the family. The man of the family shaved the wool from the sheeps and sorted them out in different categories. The women of the house did the carding and spun the fibre into yarn, which was then dyed by the men again. Carpets are not made the same way any more,” he lamented.