KASHAN RUG (detail) Showing the Persian ruler Fath Ali Shah (d.1834) with his famous black beard dyed with henna and indigo. Late 19th century.


For five millennia the world's most precious and magical dye was indigo. ‘No other dyestuff has been valued by mankind so widely and for so long,' claims Dr Jenny Balfour-Paul, world expert on indigo, author of the definitive book on the dye, Indigo. Across the globe it was used for textiles, patterns, furnishing, clothes, paint and ink. It has threaded its way through history, cropping up in botany, chemistry, industry, costume, arts, ethnography, medicine and cosmetics. Today, denim jeans, whose colour is of Eastern origin, have taken indigo from the West back into the East, linking cultures and generations. Only in the 20th and 21st centuries, with synthetic dyes, has its role changed. Yet, although colour is the first visual impression of any object, its creation and production is often overlooked or taken for granted.

The production of indigo is an alchemical process and its mysterious transformations are steeped in myth and magic. Indigo bearing plants grow all over the world and the dyestuff extracted from them has a chemistry which makes it compatible with all kinds of natural fibres. Growing the plant is just one aspect, but extracting the dye is much more complex. Indigo plants and leaves are soaked in water and, in traditional societies, urine and ashwater is added, setting off fermentation which reduces the oxygen, and the surface foam oxidises to blue. Liquid is drained off to leave indigo paste. Sometimes fermentation is done by composting the leaves.

Indigo is one of the most colourfast of dyes, hence its use in tapestries and carpets as well as clothes, and one of the most durable. Silk fragments from ancient China, traded along the Silk Road, have been found in tombs and caves indicating the use of indigo centuries ago. The exhibition includes the oldest surviving indigo recipe in the form of a tablet from ancient Babylon, and also dye balls, dye samples, botanical drawings and indigo-dyed cloth with ritualistic and talismanic meanings.

In Southeast Asian textiles, where the Indian dye Indigofera tinctoria was introduced around the first millennium BC, the colour blue was frequently combined with red and white to create a talismanic protection for garments destined for soldiers or religious ceremonies. From Sumba, in Indonesia, a cotton wrapper, a hinggi, is displayed, woven in warp ikat in shades of blue indigo. The process of ikat is where yarn is tightly bound in patterns before dyeing to prevent the dye from penetrating the pre-arranged pattern of the bound parts. The tying, untying and retying and then arranging on the loom is highly complicated. While the subsequent weaving process is straightforward for the single warp or weft ikat, double ikats require great skill and patience.

The Sumban ikat pieces illustrate the ceremonial significance of dyes in Indonesia which vary across the islands. Blue is often believed to wards off evil spirits and shrouds for corpses are frequently made up of blue warp ikat. In Sumba, an unlucky death is called a ‘blue death.' Another piece from Java is a beautiful sarong, dating from 1890, wax-resist printed on sized cotton, and from Savu island is an ikat dyed woven cotton sarong, dating from 1900-1950, showing how the traditions have continued.

Blue has always been a favoured colour in Japan and China where five basic colours were worn at the royal courts and were imbued with cosmic significance. Blue was especially important for nobles and princes, while officials of lower rank would wear black. The Japanese developed soft-edge resist methods of handling cloth, whereby the dye penetrates the fabric in varying degrees, known as shibori, which means ‘squeezed', involving binding up cloth around small objects before immersing it in dye. This practice flourished in the Edo period, 1600-1868, where indigo-dyed shibori textiles celebrated the quality of the dye as well as embellishing the cloth itself. Innumerable designs based on wrapping, binding and folding were developed. Resist-dyed cotton was known as sashiko.