Collage in Colour

“You have such interesting taste in clothes”, cooed a lady clad in heliotrope chiffon at a party that I was at, to do my bit for my corporate husband. “Though I wouldn’t dream of wearing something like that, the colours are so elegant. I guess that all of you creative people who work with weavers have to have exquisite taste….?”

“Colour, Annapurna, is an emotion”, Mohana was talking to me during a workshop on vegetable dyes. “It has to have context. A brilliant chevalikudi red is not more effective than the plain kora cream or the technically perfect indigo blue… the point is not whether the cream and gold plain mundu of Kerala is more beautiful than the scarlet and vermilion coloured bandhini odhni of Rajasthan. In the lush colourful flora and greenery of the Kerala landscape you can only wear a kora off-white mundu…and against the drab dusty desert you need the crimsons and the indigos”.

“What do I wear in chaotic Hyderabad”, I ask feeling all at sea in this metaphysical conversation.

“What do you feel?”, she sighs looking at my hurriedly put together kurtha pyjama dupatta, ‘Confused?”

“Are you sure that yarn can survive this heat?”, Salim and I conducting our first workshop in Chinnur, sweat pouring down as the huge dung covered earthen stoves fed by wood competed with the blazing sun in the Naxalite district of Adilabad. The pokerfaced weavers watching us slave to prove the eternal beauty and desirability of Eco friendly vegetable dyes.

“All that work and hardly any colour”, whispers I pretend not to hear as I avoid Salim’s eyes.

“Isn’t it beautiful passionate jagada?” as the yarn takes a colour between yellowish brown and green. “What is the name of this color, may I ask, or have we just made it up?”, as I frantically scribble the recipe just in case it really is beautiful and we have to replicate it!

“You lack imagination”, she says. I remembered the little boy in the story about the emperor’s new clothes.

“If you don’t have an eye for colour, you can learn.”, Uzramma tells me on the first day of work as a field worker in a craft support organization, “Use your technical training to learn the processes of vegetable dyes and then teach our artisans”.

“I trained in electronics I don’t know Chemistry, I’m not even the aesthetic type”.

“Nonsense! everybody is the aesthetic type- anyway don’t worry- with vegetable dyes- your lack of aesthetics will do no damage at all”, she cuts short the arguments bursting from my lips.

Many workshops later…

“I don’t care whether you like the colour or not…-its my job to teach you how to make all the colours…not just the ones you like”, my exasperated tones in Chirala at the weavers cooperative. Of course they don’t learn greeny browny yellow. We repeat chevalikudi red and more chevalikudi red, and never mind the back breaking work.

“Our families don’t die from the long term usage of chemical colours”, Srinath, a tie and dye weaver from Koyalagudem advocating vegetable dyes at the buyer seller meet on vegetable dyed fabrics. “Its instant death, accessible in our own houses in a dabba (box)- every time a boy has a failed love affair or a girl fails an exam, everytime a child accidentally dips its hands into a colourful box of chemical dyes…… Its more than colour, its about life itself”

“Finally, a colour I recognize!”, says my sister. I try to explain that the revival of the traditional indigo vat technology is the culmination of ten years of collaboration between the traditional artisans and the botanists, dyers, technologists, chemists and untiring field workers.

“Its BLUE isn’t it!!’

“Well yes..but…”. I give up!

“…you can always tell the artistic type by the colours they wear”, I snap back into the conversation….”the colour you’re wearing is so…is so…”

Ms. Heliotrope is lost for words.. aesthetically evolved I burst out, secure in the folds of my technically perfect, non toxic, handled greenery browny yellow sari!