Ancestral Wisdom in the Face of Colonial dissonance

In the picture above

you can see a Bengali tant cotton Sari sitting in a pure plant mordant, waiting to go into an organic indigo vat. In my indigo work I use entirely organic, directly plant sourced, unprocessed, no mined materials from Mother Earth, to both mordant my naturally dyed fibers and fabrics and also to maintain my organic indigo vat.

Although I had felt this calling to source colors directly from nature I always hesitated to start natural dyeing myself. The reason being that whenever I looked into the popular techniques for natural dyeing I was presented with a list of materials that looked and sounded anything but 'natural'. At least not according to my understanding of that word. I came to realize that the materials used by natural dyers in the western/-ised world, specially in mordanting but also in raising indigo vats, would have me armed to the elbows in rubber gloves, masked against toxic inhalations, dedicating specialist pots and containers for dyeing to prevent cross contamination. I always kept asking myself, these are fruits and vegetables right? Many of them edible, the majority not toxic in their natural state even if inedible. So why all this fuss? I began to feel that all too familiar ring of dissonance, when faced with the realities imposed on our collective experience by the continuation of colonial practices in every sphere of material culture.

The materials I kept seeing in books and online, while being technically 'naturally' or 'organically' based, have been processed to such a degree that they are for all intents and purposes ‘chemicals’ by the time they are packaged and sold for industrial and textile processes.

When I started to look more deeply into the manufacturing processes that are used to mine things like metallic salts, I realized that there was a far greater network of consequences and environmental impacts involved in the creation of materials used in the making of fibers and textiles that are still labelled as 'natural' or 'earth friendly,' and sold on the market at the price point that these labels conveniently bestow.

My explorations inevitably led me to contemplate on this important question; how did our people, my ancestors, thousands of years ago, operating in large city complexes like Mohenjo Daro, Harappa and the agrarian societies of Vedic civilization, dye fibers and fabrics not just to supply the populace of the region, but also sufficient quality and quantity for trading with other larger civilizations of that time? How did these people work with plant dyes, without manufactured or industrially mined materials for mordanting, dye extraction and, in the case of indigo, achieving reduction in a vat?

This question of 'how did our people do it for thousands of years?' keeps guiding me in my attempts to both rediscover the traditional techniques and technologies that made the South Asian subcontinent such a center of textile excellence for millennia. It continues to feed my motivation to keep finding the most truly earth friendly ways of approaching my dance with fiber and plants.

As I walk this path of resurrecting ancient techniques that served our people for so long, lost and abandoned under the all crushing boots of the colonial-industrial complex, I'm realizing exactly how much has been lost. It's turning into quite the detective story, but it is a story aligned with my Dharma in every way.

Namaskaram,

Daki