From Page to Plate: Seeing Islamic South Asian Talismanic Shirts as Lamellar Armor

• In Event: Fashioning Status: Making Meaning through Dress and Adornment across Asia

Abstract

Dress and personal adornment are unique sites for the intersection of visual networks that encode information about social status, religious affiliation, and political loyalties. This paper examines and contextualizes an unusual category of dress in the Islamic world, the talismanic shirt, in order to demonstrate the fluidity with which textiles participate within such visual network. In contradistinction to their widely varied Ottoman cousins, the Islamic talismanic shirts attributed to late fifteenth- through sixteenth-century South Asia form a visually cohesive group. While aspects of their formal similarity have been studied with regards to their relationship to the production of bihārī Qur’an manuscripts, few connections have been attempted with other aspects of Islamic South Asian material culture generally, and garments specifically. An emphasis on the inscription of Qur’anic text -- an admittedly critical factor in their function as talismans -- obscures that these objects are textiles created in the shape of garments worn on the human body. The specific garment that the placement of this Qur’anic text invokes is a shirt of composite lamellar and chain-mail armor. Heightened through the careful manipulation of details commonly found in bihārī Qur’an manuscripts, such as verse markers and decorative page elements, Qur’anic pages turn into armored plates. In this paper, I will analyze the layout of these garments in comparison to lamellar and plate armor examples from the period. Through connecting these shirts to other unusual and highly specialized pieces of worn technology, this comparison demonstrates how these objects seamlessly integrate the spheres of books arts, the making of talismans, and the construction of armaments into pieces of true spiritual armor.

Author

• Rose Muravchick, Vassar College