Indian rugs and Indian rug designs tend to be the melting pot of traditional weaving. India offers a wide range of floor coverings that have evolved over the centuries to suit a variety of tastes, climates and budgets. Most of the fine designs coming out of India were borrowed from other cultures and implemented into the Indian techniques. Indian weavers have been known to copy the extraordinary patterns and styles of Persian.

Primary Aspect:

The primary aspect that characterizes Indian rugs is their singular, intense palette, based on yellow, pink, light blue, and green and best displayed in the typical bluish red known as lac red, used only for the grounds of fields. The designs, although indebted to the Persian style, are distinguished by their asymmetry and strong sense of the pictorial, with close attention to reality and detail.

The decoration shows a preference for naturalistic floral designs and figural scenes arranged on directional layouts, and the compositions are not elaborate; the most common layouts involve full-field distributions using rows or grids, in-and-out palmetts, and prayer rugs.

Because of this naturalistic taste, Indian rugs lack characteristic decorative motifs, aside from those few borrowed from Persia or other production areas, such as Herat botch, and cloudbands. The general character that informs these carpets is thus very rich, aristocratic, and refined, though without the ideal or abstract elegance common to the Persian manner, and seeming instead concrete and exuberant, with a sensibility that verges on the carnal.

All Indian rugs are made using the asymmetrical knot and stand apart technically because of their particularly dense knotting, well suited to rendering realistic figural details. The foundation is usually of cotton and the pile wool; in northern regions the soft and shiny wool of Kashmir is used. Sometimes silk is used both in the foundation and for the pile. The pile is usually trimmed low. The carpets are usually medium or large in size, reaching as much as 150 x 240 inches.

Associated Names:

Some names associated with Indian rugs are Jaipur, Agra, Kashmir, Dhurries and Indo-mir. The first three refer to places in India where traditional Indian styles, Persian, European, Chinese and Turkoman styles are made. Dhurries are Indian flat-weaves with designs similar to those of Native American Navajos, which were very popular in the West about fifteen years ago, and Indo-mirs are Indian rugs with an all-over design called mir-i-boteh, which has multiple rows of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal small botehs.