Spot the figure in the lungi in the painting below

Saint Francis Xavier Preaching in Goa, André Reinoso, 1610, Lisbon, Portugal, Museu de São Roque/Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa

In the early seventeenth century, Portuguese painter André Reinoso created Saint Francis Xavier Preaching in Goa—one of twenty canvases narrating the life of the Jesuit missionary whose journeys popularized Christianity across Asia. Painted around 1610 (may be a little later), for the Jesuit Church of São Roque in Lisbon, the work reflects the fervent missionary spirit and global reach of early modern Catholicism.

Reinoso’s scene imagines a moment in Goa, then the heart of Portugal’s Indian Ocean empire. Saint Francis Xavier stands at the center, arm raised, addressing a crowd that includes Indian listeners in vivid dress, children gathered at his feet, and Portuguese soldiers and nobles on horseback. Though the artist never visited India, his rendering of costume and setting reveals a fascination with ethnographic detail—an attempt to visualize the “exotic” world of the East for European viewers.

In Lisbon, these paintings served both as devotional tools and as propaganda for Jesuit missionary triumphs abroad.

For me the most fascinating elements of this painting are of course the variety of textiles displayed. While Reinoso never visited India, Indian textiles were abundantly available in Lisbon at this time and I wonder if he may have sourced some of these textiles locally to use as samples in this painting. In any case, because I work with checked cotton textiles, I was excited to notice the lungi depicted here.

On the far right, closest to the viewer, stands a man in a lazy contrapposto posture, arm around waist gently resting on the top fold of his single wrap lungi.

The lungi—a simple, woven wrap of cotton—has been an essential garment in South India for centuries. Worn by men and women across Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and other parts of South India, it functions as both workwear and leisurewear, prized for its comfort in the tropical climate. Woven in local handloom centers in South India as well as in western India and Bengal, lungis are recognizable by their bold, yarn-dyed checks and stripes.

In the painting, the lungi is shown for what it is — the humble everyday wear of the working classes. It is easily identifiable and distinguishable not only as a textile but as a way to delineate the class structuring of the painting: the people to the left side of the Francis Xavier are Indians, to the right are Portuguese or Luso-Indian. The lungi-wearing man carries a nice dagger that is pushed into the waist of the lungi.

My second favorite element in the painting are the boisterous children in the middle not quite interested in the preaching and being disciplined by another missionary.

The details are so well-done in this painting and I have to remind myself that none of these paintings are documentary in its nature.

Curator John Guy talks about this painting briefly in a chapter about the very early globalization of the Indian textiles’ styles. He confirms that while not ethnographic, all these textiles you see people wearing in this painting are accurately portrayed. The book is available to read in full online.

Indeed, if you are familiar with the lungi, a black and white checked cotton lungi is something that is still worn in India today.

Though humble, the lungi’s history traces deep cultural and trade connections across the Indian Ocean. Its checked patterns and tubular form link it to a family of wrap garments—including the Burmese longyi and Malay sarong—that circulated through maritime exchange since early medieval times. By the eighteenth century, similar South Indian checked cottons were shipped worldwide as “Madras,” shaping fashion far beyond the subcontinent.

If you are curious about the use of Madras checks in the world, check out my collaborative digital history project
Connecting Threads: Fashioning Madras in the Caribbean.

In South India today, the lungi remains both a marker of local identity and a living textile tradition—adapted by powerloom and handloom weavers alike, bridging the ordinary and the global in a single piece of cloth.

Recommended Reading: Andrews, Jean. 2023. The Canonization of St Francis Xavier in Spanish Habsburg Lands: A Poetry Challenge in Madrid, Sacristy Paintings by André Reinoso in Lisbon and an Altarpiece by Pieter Pawel Rubens in Antwerp. Religions 14, no. 12: 1505.

An illustration from an 1850 book “Life in India or Madras, the Neilgherries, and Calcutta” by John Welsh Dulles showing a temple in Chintadripet, Chennai.

If you’ve ever driven past the narrow lanes of Chintadripet in central Chennai — now lined with hardware shops, workshops, and temples — you’re passing through what was once one of the earliest planned textile villages in colonial South India.

In the mid-eighteenth century, the East India Company called it Chindadry Petta. But it was founded not by British officials, but by Tamil weavers who built it, managed it, and gave it life.

A Village of Looms and Promises

Around the 1730s, Company officials at Fort St. George decided to finance a village for textile production. They wanted a site where weavers could be organized, monitored, and financed for export work, a kind of proto-industrial settlement designed to feed Europe’s hunger for Indian cotton. To make this happen, they turned to two local men: Narryn and Chintomboy (Naran and Chinnatampi in Tamil I presume), hereditary weavers who were brothers. They were promised privileges: tax exemptions, freedom to manage their affairs, and a small grant of 300 pagodas to build houses for the weavers. These privileges were the same as the Company provided their father Timan.

Their efforts succeeded. The new settlement, called Chindadry Petta in British East India Company records, soon hummed with over 600 looms producing chintz, moorees, and ginghams. Every piece of textile from this village when exported bore a stamped mark: “Chindadry Petta.” But Chindadry Petta wasn’t just a Company worksite. It was a community. The brother built temples for weavers who settled there to worship at and tanks to help with cloth washing and other needs. They convinced nearby merchants to contribute annual donations for religious upkeep, and even obtained a parwana from the Nawab of Carnatic, Safdar Ali Khan, thus guaranteeing a steady allowance for the temples.

War, Loss, and a Plea

Then came the French attack on Madras in 1746 in the First Carnatic War. Chindadry Petta was plundered. Warehouses were looted, cloth worth thousands of pagodas was destroyed, and homes and temples were burned.

When peace returned, the sons of the two founder brothers, Jaggoo and Chengalroyah, submitted a petition to the British Deputy Governor in 1750. Their fathers, they wrote, had “taken great trouble” to make the village flourish. They had borrowed money to pay weavers and keep the looms running even during crisis.

Now everything was gone.

They asked for recognition, and for compensation for the losses “their fathers sustained by the loss of Madras.” Their words are deferential, yet deeply human: a quiet record of artisans trying to rebuild after empire’s wars.

A Living Legacy

Nearly three centuries later, Chintadripet still bears the traces of that history. The old temples of Siva and Perumal, the grid-like street plan, and the enduring presence of small-scale workshops all echo its origins as a planned weaving quarter.

Their petition from 1750, preserved in the British Library’s India Office Records, reminds us that the foundations of colonial Madras were not laid by imperial engineers alone. They were woven, quite literally, by the hands of local artisans who made the city — and its textiles — their own.

Suggested Citation

Murali, Deepthi. “The Weavers of Chindadry Petta: A Petition from the Heart of Colonial Madras.” Connecting Threads Digital History Project (2025). Based on British Library, India Office Records, IOR G/18/15, pp. 191–192. CC BY-NC 4.0.

🧵 Context Note: What Was Chindadry Petta?

Chindadry Petta, the colonial name for today’s Chintadripet, was established around 1734 under East India Company supervision.
It was designed as a “weavers’ village” supplying cotton goods for export to Britain.
Hundreds of looms, dyers, and spinners lived within its walls, working under hereditary leaders who negotiated directly with Company officials.
Its Tamil name, often written Chinna Tari Pettai — “small loom quarter” — captures its identity as both a production hub and a living neighborhood.
When the French destroyed it in 1746, local weavers rebuilt it almost immediately — a testament to the resilience that continues to define Chintadripet’s working-class heart today.