INDIGO & KHAKI INDIA'S OTHER BIG CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE WORLD OF FASHION

With all the on-going kerfuffle over Prada and Kolhapuris, Dior and Mukaish, Brad Pitt and Tangalia, it seems timely that ad man and creator of the popular social media handle The English Nut, Sumanto Chattopadhyay's delightful, history-packed, new book Stories of Words And Phrases (Rupa Publications) reminds us about the local origins of Khaki and Indigo, which along with the likes of Calico and Madras Checks have been among India's many contributions to the world of clothing and fashion.

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The excerpt below provides the back story of not just the two commonly used English words, but also the products themselves.

Indigo is one of the oldest dyes on Earth.

It was probably invented during the bronze age in the Indus Valley Civilization (3300–1300 BCE). I remember studying about this civilization in history class and feeling proud that ‘our’ civilization was so rich and ancient. One of the oldest in the world and certainly the largest known, its estimated population was 5,000,000 people. When one of its cities, Rojdi (in modern-day Gujarat), was excavated, archaeologists found seeds belonging to the Indigofera plant family, from which indigo dye is made. Remnants of cloth dyed blue from 1750 BCE were found in another centre of this civilization, Mohenjo-daro, located in modern-day Larkana, in Sindh, Pakistan. It is believed that the blue stripes on Egyptian linen mummy cloths were also dyed with indigo.

Fifty or more varieties of Indigofera grow in India. Indigofera tinctoria is the kind most popularly used to produce indigo. For centuries, these plants have been processed into small cakes of pigment and exported. Indigo reached Europe through the traditional trade route known as the Silk Road. It was bought by the ancient Greeks and Romans (300 BCE–400 CE) as a luxury item.

The Greeks named the dye indikon, meaning ‘from India’. This passed into Latin as indicum or indico and came into English as ‘indigo’ through the old Portuguese word endego. Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder recorded the fact that indigo came to Europe from India in his encyclopaedia Naturalis Historia. Europeans believed that indigo was of mineral origin till the late thirteenth century, when Marco Polo observed during his travels in the East that it was extracted from plants.