The carpet collector of Bengaluru

I first heard of Danny Mehra 10 years ago. I would hear of him off and on, when he was holding an exhibition or doing a pop-up. I never really got the chance to meet him until earlier this week. All I knew was that he had started his collection right after he got married. His first two carpets were gifts from his mother-in-law, and he had two dogs — Tulu and Luri — named after carpets. At one point, he had 2,500 carpets in his collection.

Two senior labradors greeted me at his door when I reached his home in Richmond Town, Bengaluru. Within minutes, they licked my hands and enjoyed some behind-the-ear scratches. I was ushered in by his driver Jose George, whom I later learnt also doubles up as his man Friday. George helps wash his carpets and entertains visitors who drop by to view his collection. Mehra emerged from a room, coffee mug in hand. “I see you’ve met the dogs,” he said, as he settled down at the table.

In a shop window

Once the dogs were coaxed out the door, he recounted his journey. “It has been 40 years since I began collecting,” Mehra told me. The wedding gifts first brought to his notice the beauty of carpets. Back then, he did not have a collector’s eye. “I wouldn’t buy them if I saw them today,” he told me.

The first carpet he bought with his own money was not a choice a trained eye would make. “I would see it in a shop window during my daily walk back home from work, but I never gathered the courage to step in and ask how much it cost,” recalled Mehra, who was living in New York City at the time. He had a career in finance. When he finally made up his mind to find out its price, he learned that the shop was run by a Pakistani and the price was 90 dollars. “I was glad I could afford it and I brought it home almost immediately,” he said.

In retrospect, though it was beautiful, it was not an object of art. “The colours were made from chrome dyes, it was probably mass produced and not made by hand,” he explained. Later, Mehra gave away the carpet to a friend’s daughter. As he spent more time understanding the art of carpet making, he found that he was most intrigued by carpets woven by tribal communities who lived and travelled along the Silk Route. An important trade route until the mid-15th century, it covered 6,400 km and connected Asia to Europe. Though Kashmir is sought after for its carpets, they are made for commercial use. The Silk Road carpets, on the other hand, were made for personal use by women from the community.

In the tribal communities, the men sheared the sheep, washed the wool and sorted what they had collected on the basis of which part of the sheep it came from. From the underbelly or under the neck came soft wool, while the back had coarser wool. The women would spin the wool into yarn. The sheep came in a range of colours, from ivory to brown and black. Other colours were dyed using natural ingredients — madder root, iron filings, pomegranate peel, flowers, onion skins, walnut husks.

Trip to Central Asia

Last year, he spent a month in Central Asia visiting countries through which the road passes. “It is impossible to find communities making these carpets in the region now. But we visited a flea market and found a few women selling hand-woven fabrics. We promptly bought a few pieces of those fabrics,” he said. 

None of the carpets, even those woven centuries earlier, can be found in the region they originated from. “The carpets all moved West decades ago. That is where the money is and that is where you can find them today, probably in private collections or with antique dealers,” he said. The tribes still exist in those regions but their way of life has changed drastically.

His own collection was built with the help of tip-offs he would get from other collectors and antique dealers.

While he was in Kyrgyzstan in 2024, his tour guide helped him find a family still involved in making felt carpets. Though they were making carpets to sell to the shops, they owned a few made for the woman of the house when she got married. Mehra was keen on buying one. They refused to sell. 

On the wall

One would expect that the floors of his three-storey apartment would be covered in carpets. But they are not. Many of his carpets are mounted on the walls. The lowest floor is his studio where the rest are stored, piled up neatly or displayed against antique furniture. “The women making these carpets were nomadic. What they were weaving was for fun or for personal use. It was not to make a profit. They did not have bank accounts or gold. They probably had a few donkeys or sheep. Maybe the chief had some camels. These carpets held immense value for them and they would carry them along wherever they went,” Mehra explained. He pointed in the direction of one displayed on the wall across the hall. “That was a saddlebag from the Zakatara region in the Caucasian mountains between the Black and Caspian seas, probably from the mid-19th century,” he said. 

We proceeded to take a closer look at another carpet, from Xinjiang in north western China. The region is known for its hand-knotted carpets, primarily made by Islamic communities. The woollen carpets became popular in the region during the Qin (221-206 BCE) and Han (202 BCE-220 CE) dynasties. 

For Mehra, carpets reflect the lives of the communities that made them, and offer an understanding of the aesthetics of the time.

In the corridor next to his drawing room hangs a multi-hued but faded and patinated piece with geometric floral motifs. “This is from southwest Iran. It is a tribal interpretation of a Persian garden, with rows of flowers and irrigation channels,” he said. 

Sleeping bag

Mehra’s study is defined by a fuzzy carpet called tulu, after which one of his dogs is named. Tulu is Turkish for hairy, and this particular piece was made by a community from the Taurus mountains in Turkey. “It is actually a shepherd’s sleeping bag,” Mehra told me, adding that the colour blocking is reminiscent of a Mark Rothko painting.

“I have been told it is inspired by Zoroastrian mythology and the squares are squares of fire. The shepherds carry the carpets on their backs, and then they roll them out and sleep on them. This must have been used by a boy. Not a very tall person. They lie down on one half and cover themselves with the other.” He got the carpet from a dealer in Turkey. “You never know when you will find the next piece,” he said. 

Collecting stamps is different. “You know you are probably missing a few from a series. But with carpets, you don’t know what you are missing until you see it. You develop an eye for it over time. I am basically looking for surprises. Something I have never seen before. That is what keeps me interested in collecting,” he explained. 

He would earlier travel extensively to build his collection, but that is not the case anymore. “If you Google tribal rugs, you will probably get a trillion hits. Only a few thousand are actually made by tribals. The rest are probably made by a designer sitting in a studio in Paris, London or Tokyo,” he rued.

What he loves about tribal carpets are the irregularities and imperfections that one can only achieve unintentionally. He cites the example of a piece displayed in his study. The left of the carpet is straight, but the right is curved. “The weaver probably started working on it, and the family had to move to a warmer place when it got cold. So the loom had to be dismantled and reassembled at the new place. The dismantling and reassembling changed the tension of the warp,” he explained. This is what distinguishes it from a tribal rug you might find easily on Google, handmade but in a factory setting. There are 20 different ways you can make something by hand. It is possible to make something by hand in one hour, but it is also possible to take 100 hours to make it. That is where the difference lies, he said. “So back in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was more like a 100-hour process,” he added.

Salvaging art

Conservation is a huge part of Mehra’s 40-year-old passion project. The carpets are put through a long preservation process. After acquiring it and bringing it home, it is put out in the sun for two to three days. Then they take a rug beater to it to get rid of dust and loose fibres. It is washed on the sloping concrete floor of his driveway with room temperature water and baby shampoo or organic soap. Once it is hosed down and excess water is removed with a squeegee, it is put out to dry. The dry carpet is handed over to Imran Malik, his carpet darner who fixes loose yarn and refurbishes bald and threadbare patches.

Sometimes the damage is such that a patch is unsalvageable. In that case, the patch is skillfully cut out. Many of the pieces hung on the walls bear holes on the surface, but that is also beautiful to Mehra. They do not diminish the value of the carpet. The pieces cut out are turned into art and framed.

As we spoke, Malik worked on a piece from a port town in present-day Azerbaijan. He was carefully strengthening the knots at the edge of the carpet. He is among only a handful of professional carpet darners from a village near Najibabad in Uttar Pradesh. Malik has been working with Mehra for
10 years. The latter met him through a friend when he was doing a show at the India International Centre in Delhi. 

Carpet darning was a thriving occupation in Malik’s village when he was a child. About 70 people were involved in it. Now, only 10-15 remain. “The younger generation is not interested, and I am doing it because this is what I learnt to do,” said Malik, who began working at the age of 11. The 34-year-old has four children back home and travels around the country at the request of affluent carpet owners and museums, and rarely, collectors like Mehra. Sometimes he takes some of the carpets back to his village to work on them.

Collectors’ concern

The biggest concern for collectors like Mehra is finding a custodian for their collection after their time. He is perhaps the only one with such an extensive collection of carpets in India. “Of course there are other collectors but you can count them on your hands and they are not as mad as I am,” he said.

Sometimes he even helps friends looking to start a collection. “Last week, a friend asked me to evaluate a carpet he wanted to buy. He was told it was made by inmates of the Bikaner jail, it was 300 years old, and it had been in a family for several generations. But Imran (Malik) took one look and said it was machine made. It was a nice design but the fact that it was machine made reduces its value by about 90%. I advised him not to buy it — it was not the ideal piece to start a collection with,” recounted Mehra.