Assamese devotion to the god Krishna is deeply rooted in the 16th-century Neo-Vaishnavite movement led by the saint- scholar Srimanta Sankaradeva. This promoted Bhakti (unconditional devotion) through art, music and drama. One of the most significant expressions of this devotion is the Vrindavani Vastra (cloth of Vrindavan), a legendary 17th-century silk tapestry illustrating episodes from Krishna's life.
Woven in the foothills of the Himalayas around 1680 (as suggested by Rosemary Crill, HALI 62, 1992), it will return to its homeland, Assam, in northeastern India through a temporary loan between the British Museum and the Assamese government. Given to the British Museum by Perceval Landon in 1905, it has been housed in London ever since. In Assam, it will be the centrepiece in a public exhibition set to open in 2027 in a newly established museum space.
Measuring more than nine metres in length, the elaborate textile consists of twelve individual strips made of lampas-woven coloured silk, each approximately 80 centimetres wide. Given its length, it would probably have been used to decorate altars of Krishna shrines or to wrap Bhagavata Purana manuscripts-Hindu texts devoted to Vishnu and Krishna.
While it is now known to be from Assam, the cloth was thought to be Tibetan when first acquired by the British Museum, despite the presence of many identificatory captions and, in one section, an eleven-line verse repeatedly woven in Assamese characters. It does, however, have a history in Tibet.
At some point, it was taken to Tibet where it appears the twelve strips were joined together, following the trading of the individual strips of cloth into the country. When assembled to form the piece as it is known today, it was used as a wall hanging in a Buddhist monastery in Gobshi. It was discovered there during the 1903-1904 Younghusband Expedition to Lhasa, and was subsequently brought to England. Each strip features depictions of the ten incarnations of the Hindu god Vishnu. One of his most important incarnations is Krishna, who in Assam is revered as a supreme being; accordingly, the textile is rich in scenes from his early life in Vrindavan. These stories were composed more than 400 years ago in the form of devotional dramas by the saint Srimanta Sankaradeva (d. 1568), who introduced Krishna devotion to Assam and guided the creation of this textile. In these texts, he wrote in the local Assamese language rather than in ancient Sanskrit.
