• by IPS Correspondent (kolkata, india)
• Thursday, February 04, 2010
• Inter Press Service

A 15-volume documentation of 3,000 natural dyes by a 19th century British textile entrepreneur will be the focus of an upcoming international seminar on natural dyes in India.

On Feb. 20, a seminar dubbed ‘Raksa’ (Hindi word for ‘protection’) will be held at the Indian Council of Cultural Relations in Kolkata, capital of India’s eastern state West Bengal.

'The seminar is important for the revival of our indigenous handloom and dye industries, which offer livelihood to countless,' said H.S. Debnath, the deputy director of the Botanical Survey of India (BSI), who discovered the omnibus. 'Everything is now in the public domain and the industry can benefit.'

Renowned natural dye experts Dominique Cardon of France, Brenda King and Jenny Balfour Paul of Britain are expected to attend the international gathering, said Debnath.

Unearthed from the dust that gathered for over 150 years in the BSI building in this eastern India metropolis, the find assumes significance for the sagging textile industry in India and the fashion world at a time when researches are looking for eco-friendly alternatives to chemical dyes. Debnath, by chance, found the volumes in a cupboard in his office in the old British-era BSI building in early 2009 in Kolkata.

The collection, ‘Specimens of Fabrics Dyed with Indian Dyes’, was compiled by 19th century textile entrepreneur Thomas Wardle (1831-1909) of Leek, a market town in the county of Staffordshire in Britain.

Wardle, who oversaw Leek’s growth as a power in the world of luxury textiles in the 19th century, was fascinated by India’s natural dye culture that he researched thoroughly the South Asian country’s ‘wild silks’.

Silk yarns and fabrics, which came from India and China, were dyed in Leek, using dyestuffs from all over the world. Debnath also found two other 18- and 14-volume companion tomes, ‘Textiles Manufactures and Costumes of the People of India’ by John Forbes Watson, along with Wardle’s works.

Watson held the position of Reporter on the Products of India at the India Office in London, which was responsible for the direct administration of the former British colony in the 1850s.

The recently discovered volumes are considered so cardinal that the Feb. 20 seminar originally slated to be held in Paris has been shifted this month to Kolkata, once the capital of British India.

The discovery soon came to the attention of researchers like Cardon. 'Renowned French archaeological textile expert Dominique Cardon, who is based in Paris, has already visited us. She is coming again for the seminar this month,' said Debnath.

Cardon came to Kolkata to evaluate Wardle’s volumes on natural dyes, he said. She found Thomas Wardle’s document exceptional.

'People in modern times think that the traditional knowledge about herb- based dye is a secret. It’s not true. This document shows that,' Cardon said in a meeting with the local media during her visit.

Debnath said researchers like Cardon were frantically looking for the works of Thomas Wardle. He said a few volumes of the works were available in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, but the Kolkata discovery nearly completes the sets.

'We are excited and we hope UNESCO [United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization] will recognise us. These 3,000 dye colours extracted from 64 plants can make 30,000 colours,' said Debnath.

'Two more sets are missing and none knows where they are,' said Debnath. Around 1851 the British had taken all resources and the knowledge from South and Southeast Asia to revive the textile industry back home.

'We are lucky to have found this series. Else much of the indigenous knowledge gets lost,' he said. 'We have already started digitisation and conservation work of the volumes.'

He said Wardle had pasted samples of each colour (like indigo, for which India is famous), numbered them and against each noted the recipes.

India’s environment ministry has taken interest in the discovery and has already sanctioned 50 million rupees (1.1 million U.S. dollars) for the preservation efforts. The country’s thousand-year-old tradition of natural dyeing has been applied to apparel, frescos and other articles.

'The saffron and maroon robes of the Buddhist monks, too, were dyed in vegetable colours,' Debnath said.

The fashion and textile world was also excited to hear about the find. According to Kolkata fashion designer Soumitra Mandal, the volumes can open new horizons for the fashion industry, which has been exploring the use of eco-friendly materials and colours.

'I think it can lead to many things at a time when we are trying to move to eco-friendly outfits and shun use of chemicals,' said Mandal, who has been designing outfits using ‘khadi’, the handspun cotton fabric popularised by the non-violent architect of India’s freedom movement, Mahatma Gandhi, as a symbol of protest against the British rule.

'With so much information typically lost over the years, it is a bit of a godsend for historians, technicians and textile lovers in general,' said Rachel Bracken-Singh, owner of Anokhi, a chic textile firm in India’s tourist town Jaipur, which promotes hand-blocked prints, hand-woven fabrics and natural dyes.

'I am certainly very keen to see this expansive natural dye palette used in our textile past but largely lost in today’s modern textile world. From the perspective of learning about a more sensitive approach to the environment within the textile industry, this find is a real boon and very timely,' she said.

According to Ashok Juneja, vice-president of The Textile Association (India), 'This is definitely going to help the industry at a time when the emphasis is on natural and organic dyes. Things on those arenas are picking up.'

S. Murugesan, chief of the Centre for Documentation, Research and Training on Natural Dyes at the rural welfare organisation Gandhigram Trust in south India’s Tamil Nadu state, said the discovery seemed very important.

'We are trying to commercialise the use of natural dye. But often we face the problem of viability and availability of raw materials. The series found in Kolkata can be of immense value,' he said.

'India was one of the leaders in the knowledge and practice of natural dyes for textiles earlier with red, blue and yellow natural dyes in great demand. With the advent of the synthetic dyes, the knowledge and the practice of extracting and application of natural dyes was lost except in few communities in India,' he said.

The Natural Dye Unit at Gandhigram, formed on the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi, is an effort to revive the knowledge of natural dyes among rural artisans and village textile workers. It also seeks to create an industry around the knowledge of natural dyes.

The unit, which started only with four dyes in 1987, today boasts an impressive 150 shades of natural dye colours completely standardised based on more than one raw material.

In Gandhigram these colours have been standardised for application in cotton, silk (about 100 shades) and woolen (40 shades). The unit concentrates on research, documentation and training in natural dyes besides production of natural dye-based cotton textiles.

According to Sunanda Mitra Roy, a researcher with the Kolkata-based Apparel Training and Design Centre (ATDC), synthetic dyes can cause skin cancer while natural dye is biodegradable and eco-friendly. 'We can treat them, enhance the property and use (them) for commercial purpose,' she said.

'If we can find cost-effective ways to use the knowledge, it can be useful. There is a need for awareness too,' said Ranjan Dasgupta, joint director of ATDC.

© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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