This miniature is an illustration to the Bhagvata Purana and depicts three different episodes. The left shows King Kamsa fast asleep, on the right he tries to snatch Durga (in an infant form) from her mother, and in the centre the Goddess issues the king a strict warning.

The left corner depicts a fabric screen that would have been used to cordon off the sleeping chamber. Such depictions in painting (of which there are many) confirm that textile was extensively used in Indian architecture, either as furnishing or to make for awnings, shamianas and tents, besides screens.

Cloth screens were integral to buildings, transforming them from an empty construct to a lived space. As Rosemary Grill refers to the Red Fort in her article ‘Textiles and Architecture in India’, ‘…the cloth screens on either side both limit public access to these royal pavilions and also join them together into a usable suite of buildings – unlike the isolated monuments they appear as today.’

These ‘movable walls’ were commonly known as qanat, meaning wing in Turkish or parda, from ‘curtain’ in Persian. Often, in royal homes, the patterns on cloth and constructed architecture complemented one another.