Tezpur, June 7: The senior curator (South and Southeast Asia), British Museum, London, Thomas Richard Blurton, said if the Assam government took responsibility for the safety and the insurance of the Vrindavani Vastra, the museum authorities would send it back to the state.

Blurton said this during a lively PowerPoint presentation on the Vrindavani Vastra at the Kalaguru Bishnu Rabha Auditorium of Tezpur University here this evening. He is the head of the South-Asian section, department of Asia, British Museum.

He has curatorial charge of the late medieval, early modern and modern collections from both South and Southeast Asia. He conducts research on these collections and has a special knowledge of the department's collection history.

In his nearly hour-long illustrated presentation-cum-talk, he said the Vrindavani Vastra was a drape woven by Assamese weavers during the 16th century under the guidance of Vaishnavite saint Srimanta Xankardeb.

The large drape illustrates the childhood of Lord Krishna in Vrindavan. Parts of the original Vrindavani Vastra are currently owned by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Musee Guimet (the Guimet Museum) in Paris.

The piece of cloth demonstrates the skilful weaving methods developed during medieval times and such complexity is rarely seen in present-day Assam.

"Assamese silk weavers depicted scenes from the Bhagavata Purana and the Mahabharat, mainly of the childhood days of Lord Krishna, on silk clothes under the supervision of saint, scholar and poet Srimanta Xankardeb and his disciple Madhabdeb during the 16th century. First woven between 1567 and 1569, it was taken to Bhutan and then later to Tibet, where European merchants brought it back to Europe. At present, it is owned by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Musee Guimet in Paris," he said.

He observed that a Vrindavani Vastra piece was collected by a reporter of The Times (London) and donated to the museum around 1904. Similar silk drapes are kept at other museums like The Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In 2004, a similar piece of silk drape, probably designed by Srimanta Xankardeb during the 16th century, was put up for auction by Christie's in New York, with a reserve price of $120,000.

At over nine metres long, this Assamese textile is the largest of its type to survive.

It is made up of 12 strips, all now sewn together. The Krishna scenes on the textile are from the 10th-century text the Bhagavata Purana, and are elaborated in the dramas of Xankardeb.

A verse from one of these is also woven into the textile, using immensely sophisticated weaving technology, now extinct in India.

Following its use in Assam the textile had a second history in Tibet. It was found there by Perceval Landon during the Young Husband Expedition sent from British India to Lhasa in 1903-1904. Landon, a friend of Rudyard Kipling, was the correspondent from The Times on the expedition, and he gave the textile to the British Museum in 1905.