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Medieval · South Asia · 500 - 1500 CE
Compare draped clothing, Delhi Sultanate court robes, and traded cotton textiles through Chola bronzes, travelers' accounts, surviving cloth, and manuscript paintings.
By Dan Schnau · Last updated
Wrapped lower garments, including the dhoti, remained important, while the Delhi Sultanate expanded the use of cut and sewn garments in northern Indian court dress.12,13 Region and social setting mattered: Chola temple bronzes show draped clothing and ornaments, while accounts of Delhi's robes of honor describe shirts, trousers, turbans, sashes, and outer robes.14,15,9
Start with Chola dynasty clothing for southern India or the Delhi Sultanate section below for northern court dress. For the following period, continue to Mughal clothing; for a garment spanning several periods, explore the history of the sari.
| Place and evidence | Clothing or adornment | What the example tells us |
|---|---|---|
| Southern India, Chola bronzes, c. 1020–40 | Draped garments and ornaments closely follow the figures' bodies.15 | These are idealized images of deities, rather than portraits of ordinary wearers. |
| Maabar, Marco Polo's travel account | Cloth around the lower body; the king distinguished by fine cloth and abundant jewelry.1 | In this account, wealth is expressed through material and ornaments as well as the amount of clothing. |
| Delhi, Ibn Battuta's reception in the 1330s | Shirt, trousers, sash, turban, shoes, and an outer robe.9 | A complete ceremonial outfit marked entry into court service. |
| Northern India or Deccan, fifteenth–early sixteenth century | A cotton shirt inscribed with Qur'anic text.19 | A rare surviving garment with a proposed protective purpose. |
The sources preserve different things. A bronze can show how a sculptor arranged a garment around a body, but cannot establish the fiber of the represented cloth. Cleveland's Chola pair of Shiva and Parvati, dated about 1020–40, is explicitly described by the museum as idealized divine imagery. Its close-fitting drapery should be read in that setting.15
Manuscript paintings provide another view. The image of Queen Trishala below was painted in Gujarat about 1450–75, although its gold-flecked border was added in the eighteenth century. It depicts a scene in a Jain religious narrative. The picture's date is useful evidence for an artist's visual vocabulary; it is not the date of the story it illustrates.20
Surviving textiles answer questions that pictures cannot. An Indian cotton fragment in the Ashmolean, found in Egypt, retains its resist-printed blue pattern. Its reported radiocarbon result is 1010 CE ±55 years. That is evidence for a particular cloth and technique; without a complete garment, it does not tell us exactly how someone wore it.7
The Chola dynasty (9th–13th century) presided over a flourishing of textile arts in southern India.2,18 Its temple bronzes show deities in wrapped unstitched garments, the folds of the lower cloth arranged in a regular, schematic pattern from the Chola period onward,14 yet rendered so lightly that the figures are "barely covered by garments and ornaments that move, yet cling to the bodies."15 For festivals the bronzes themselves were dressed in silken garments.14 Women typically wore a long cloth draped as a lower garment, sometimes with a separate breast cloth, while men wore the dhoti, a single length of fabric wrapped around the waist and legs in various styles.12
South Indian weavers became renowned for their mastery of cotton, producing cloth of exceptional fineness; writing shortly after the Chola period, Marco Polo described cottons from the Coromandel coast as resembling spider's web.1 Their most consequential skill, though, was fixing color to cotton with alum and iron mordants so that it held fast,3 an expertise built on centuries of experience that foreigners "sought in vain to duplicate."16 The patola silk — a double-ikat weave requiring extraordinary skill — was woven in Gujarat and became a prized trade cloth in Indonesia.5,6 Coromandel dyers drew reds from chay root and blue from indigo, and possibly yellow from turmeric.3 The trade networks of the Chola maritime empire carried these fabrics to ports throughout the Indian Ocean, where, over the centuries, Indian cloth was given as gifts to rulers and in some places came to be valued as a form of currency.2,18,8
For a fuller account, see Chola dynasty clothing, jewelry, and temple weaving.
Marco Polo's account of Maabar describes both men and women wearing cloth around the lower body. He includes rich and poor in that description, then singles out the king's fine cloth, necklaces, bracelets, anklets, and rings. The distinction he draws is therefore not simply between an unclothed poor population and a covered elite: ornament and the quality of cloth also communicate wealth.1
Polo also makes a sweeping claim that the province had no tailors. This is a traveler's statement about one place, not a reliable rule for all of South Asia. Read it alongside the sewn garments documented in northern courts, rather than using it to erase regional differences.1,13
Delhi's ceremonial clothing served another purpose. In Stewart Gordon's account of Ibn Battuta's reception, the visitors changed into their new outfits in a robing hall before joining the assembled court. Clothing was part of the act of appointment and recognition. That setting explains why the elaborate ensemble is evidence for court service, not a wardrobe list for every farmer, craft worker, or market trader.9
The establishment of the Delhi Sultanate around 1206 brought rulers from Central Asia, and with them the Persian language and the clothing traditions of the Islamic world, to northern India.11,13 The new ruling class wore tailored and stitched garments, extending their role in northern court dress alongside older draped clothing.13,12 A set of robes of honor from the Sultan of Delhi comprised a shirt, sash, trousers, turban, shoes, and outer robe.9
The Metropolitan Museum preserves a cotton talismanic shirt attributed to northern India or the Deccan and dated to the fifteenth–early sixteenth century. Qur'anic writing fills painted panels across its surface, bordered by the names of God. The museum suggests it may have been worn under armor for protection. Its survival makes sewing and decoration tangible, but its unusual function prevents us from treating it as an ordinary work shirt.19
Historians describe the change, crudely, as a shift from draped to stitched,13 but the sewn robe remained a mark of the court; beyond it, the wrapped garments typical of India — the dhoti, the lungi and the sari — stayed in everyday use.9 The sultans also patronized luxury textiles in royal workshops, or karkhanas, a practice the Mughals continued.13 When the Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta reached Delhi in the 1330s, the sultan was giving out close to 200,000 robes of honor a year, their silks drawn from China, the Middle East, Egypt and his own workshops.9,12
How court dress developed under the Mughal emperors is traced in Mughal clothing and court dress.
The Chandayana painting illustrated above is dated about 1540 by the Cleveland Museum. It records a Sufi romance in a style that helped shape Mughal painting, rather than providing a direct illustration of thirteenth-century Delhi.21 Likewise, the pointed-hemmed jama associated with Akbar's courtiers belongs to the later sixteenth century; a portrait from his court dated about 1575 is discussed in the early modern South Asian survey.12,22
The V&A describes the peshwaz, a front-opening women's robe worn over trousers and often a bodice, as a court style with pre-Mughal roots. Its surviving example, however, is dated to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. The historical description and the date of that particular garment are different kinds of evidence.10
The sari's longer story, from ancient wrappers to the modern drape, is traced in the history of the sari.
Medieval South Asian weavers and dyers commanded a wide repertoire of patterning techniques. Ikat weaving — in which yarns are resist-dyed before being placed on the loom — takes its most demanding form in the patola silks of Gujarat, where both warp and weft threads were tied and dyed before weaving to create intricate geometric and figurative patterns.5,6 This double ikat technique is highly sophisticated.5,6 Patola textiles became prized status symbols in Indonesia, where the nobility wore them as markers of wealth and rank.5,6,8 For the older roots of this trade, see ancient South Asian clothing.
Block printing — in which carved wooden blocks were used to stamp patterns onto cloth — and mordant dyeing — in which fabrics were treated with chemical fixatives before being dipped in dye baths to produce vibrant, colorfast hues — allowed South Asian artisans to produce richly colored cotton textiles for export, not only as luxuries but for everyday use as far away as Egypt.7,3,17 These cotton fabrics circulated through the Indian Ocean trade network from Egypt to Indonesia, shaping dress cultures across the maritime world.7,8
Later objects help explain techniques but need their own dates. The kalamkari temple hanging cited here, painted with scenes from Hindu mythology, was made in 1881–82; the V&A's process samples, dated about 1919, demonstrate painting with a bamboo pen and the use of mordants.4,3 They illustrate how the work is done, not surviving medieval outfits. The nineteenth-century patola pictured above should be read in the same way: as an example of double-ikat structure, with its date kept separate from the earlier history of textile exchange.5,6
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