Carpet handicrafts

India offers a wide range of floor coverings that have evolved over the centuries to suit a variety of tastes, climates and budgets. The woollen and silk carpets are more renowned compared to the other materials such as cotton and several vegetable fibres, which are used for making attractive and practically useful mats and durries. In the early stages, the motifs used in the Indian carpets were purely Persian. Later, various other designs were introduced from Afghanistan, Turkey, China, Morocco and France. Gradually, the pile carpet industry was Indianised and assumed a character of its own. Each region developed a distinct style of carpet weaving.