Short-Lived Dyes and the Seasons in Eighteenth-Century South Asia

This interdisciplinary talk brings together poetry, crafted textiles, and their representations in painting, to examine how vivid but quickly-fading dyestuffs manifested both the intensity of emotions but also the liberation of seasonal change in eighteenth-century South Asia. Documents from the period, including a rare dye recipe book, records of the agricultural production of dyestuffs, and account books from a royal dyeing workshop, suggest the widespread use and importance of certain labile, unfixed dyes – safflower, turmeric, and saffron –during weddings and festivals, particularly the springtime celebrations of Holi and the summer onset of the monsoon. While the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries coincided with the increasing European mercantile encroachment into the trade in South Asian cloth, the objects and dye materials I will discuss evaded European economic control. This more localized, historical examination traces how the particular ecology and unique dye materials of a region helped shape the seasonal landscape of eighteenth-century South Asia.

Sylvia Houghteling specializes in early modern visual and material culture with a focus on the history of textiles, South Asian art and architecture, and the material legacies and ruptures of European colonialism. Her first book, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India (Princeton University Press, 2022), which won the 2023 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association, examined the textiles crafted and collected across the Mughal Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, showing how woven objects helped to shape the social, political, religious, and aesthetic life of early modern South Asia. Houghteling’s ongoing research is concerned with questions of temporality and the unique material histories of the Indian Ocean trade.