Category Archives: India

Indigo

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Indigo is probably the most familiar dye in the world and has a long history of use. The first identified use is from 4000 years ago in Peru. Our word indigo, however, comes from a Greek root word meaning Indian dye since it was from India that indigo traveled to Europe via the Silk Road. The use of the dye quickly spread. From the Tuaregs in the Sahara to Cameroon, clothing dyed with indigo signified wealth.

Prior to the arrival of indigo in Europe, woad was the tradition dye. It produces a lighter blue. (One of the theories is that blue previously meant a shade similar to cyan.) In the New World, enslaved people were put to work cultivating indigo which became a significant cash crop. There were large plantations in South Carolina. (See Death of a Dyer.)

During the time of Will Rees, all of the yarn he worked with would have been dyed with these natural dyes. Indigo, by the way, was very expensive.

Indigo is not water soluable and so has to be treated to make it useable. One of the pre-industrial processes  was  soaking it in stale urine. Many accounts do not mention this particular fact but the pungency of the process is regularly described. (I used indigo a library program and when it was ‘curing’, it smelled so terrible, we all left the room.) The result is known as indigo white. Fabric dyed in the indigo white turns blue with oxidation. Indigo is also toxic so there is plenty of opportunity for indigo workers to become sick. And despite the processing, indigo fades slowly over time. Just take a look at your jeans. Denim is dyed with indigo and fades.

I saw items dyes with indigo in the highlands of Peru. The hanks of wool were all different colors from a light royal blue to such a deep blue it was almost navy. Truly beautiful colors.

Synthetic dyes have now almost taken over for indigo and the other natural dyes.

Politics and cloth

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One of the things I have found so interesting is the way politics infuses everything; even the simplest article.

For example, cloth. We take it for granted. But cloth is important and has a very involved history.

But back to politics and calico.

Cottons, especially the calicoes, imported from India became very popular in the late 1700s. In Salem, calicoes were one of the primary imports into the new United States.

In England, however, which had always had a thriving wool trade, various protectionist laws were established to protect the woolen industry from this threat. First the printed calicoes were banned. This created trade in the gray unfinished cloth (fustian) which was sent to London to be finished.

A flourishing industry in India was almost destroyed to protect the English wool trade.

Then the wool trade objected when the imports of cotton recovered. Parliament passed a law fining anyone caught wearing dyed or ‘stained’ calico, but they exempted neckcloths and fustian.

In 1783 Thomas Bell invented a process to print cotton using copper rollers. At first only a few pieces were printed but by 1850 over 20,000 pieces were completed.

Now the Calico printers in their turn took steps to protect their product.  In 1916, they and the other printers joined and formed a trade association. This then set minimum prices for each ‘price section’ of the industry. This held until 1954 when it was challenged by the government Monopolies Commission.

Even printed cloth has a political history.