Temple textiles and banners

Much of the sacred art of the Kandyan kingdom was made not with the brush but with the loom and the needle, woven, embroidered and hung. The temple and the court kept their own textile craftsmen, and the royal embroiderers worked to a double charge: the garments of the king and his household, and the vestments, curtains, canopies and flags of the temples and shrines. The Kandyan embroidery stands apart from that of the rest of the island in its designs, colours and materials, worked in cotton and silk thread on a homespun ground.

The temple banner, the kodi, and the embroidered hanging carried the same repertoire of sacred and auspicious motifs the muralists used, the lotus, the goose, the creeper and the guardian, translated into thread and cloth. Alongside this courtly craft ran a village one, the dumbara weaving of the hill-country valley of that name, whose figured mats, worked in the fibre of the hana plant on a simple pit loom, still supply the Temple of the Tooth.

Between them, the loom and the needle carried the island’s ornament into a form the wall could not hold, and kept the same tradition alive in cloth that the Sittara kept in paint.