Abstract
This paper explores the metaphorical and material significance of short-lived fabric dyes in medieval and early modern South Asian art, literature, and religious practice. It explores dyers’ manuals, paintings, textiles, and popular and devotional poetry to demonstrate how the existence of ephemeral dyes opened up possibilities for mutability that cannot be found within more stable, mineral pigments, set down on paper in painting. While the relationship between the image and the word in South Asian art is most often mutually enhancing, the relationship between words and color, and particularly between poetry and dye color, operates on a much more slippery basis. In the visual and literary arts of South Asia, dye colors offered textile artists and poets alike a palette of vibrant hues and a way to capture shifts in emotions and modes of devotion that retained a sense of impermanence. More broadly, these fragile, fleeting dye materials reaffirm the importance of tracing the local and regional histories even of objects, like textiles, that circulated globally.
Highlights
When the medieval poet, Amır Khusrau (1253–1325) beseeched his Sufi teacher, NizāmuddınAuliyā, for spiritual instruction, he did so in the language of dyes and color: “Colorful [raṅgıle], come color me in your own hue./You are my lord, Beloved of God./My veil [shawl] and my lover’s turban, color them both with spring./You are my lord, Beloved of God./As the price you demand for the pigment,/ accept the payment of my flowering youth” (Losensky and Sharma 2011, p. 105).1The metaphor travels across three levels: the devotee begs his Sufi master, or pır, to initiate him, to envelop him, to teach him, and to “color me in your own hue”
In dyers’ manuals, paintings, textiles, and later popular and devotional poetry, short-lived dyes opened up possibilities for mutability that cannot be found within more stable, mineral pigments, set down on paper in painting
By reintegrating the material circumstances and visual experience of dye colors with their appearance in textual form, this study aims to recapture both the vibrancy and temporal possibilities that these lost colors brought to the visual and textual arts of South Asia
Summary
Amır Khusrau (1253–1325) beseeched his Sufi teacher, Nizāmuddın. Critical accounts of color have historicized the unstable, “nomadic” meanings of different hues across time and place, pointing to the potential from the colonial period into the twentieth century for both violence and agency in indigo-blue, “Indian yellow”, and sparkling gold (Bailkin 2005; Brown 2020; Eaton 2012, 2013; Lally 2019) While these accounts often focus on the more stable mineral and vegetable pigments of painting, they demonstrate the cultural and political significance of both the materiality and visual appearance of color. For this reason, while ethnographic accounts from more recent periods can help in tracing the history of dyes in medieval and early modern India, they must be approached with caution given the changing identities and meanings of pigments over time. In the medieval and early modern periods, there was a vibrancy, desirability, and an unpredictability, to these dyes’ behavior that seems to have heightened their appeal as a color and their efficacy as a metaphor
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