Indian heritage

Press, 21 May 1981, Page 12

Indian heritage

Habitat

George Chimirri

Readers may recall, one of last year’s , columns entitled Nature’s Best, in which I wrote about fabrics, including Indian cottons. ■’ • - ■I wondered, while writing this article, how many of you know that the names we take so much for granted in today s descriptive terminology. Were, in many cases, derivations or corruptions, of Indian words;

It .is not unusual for our modern world to rediscover the wisdom arid aesthetics of an ancient culture. But the force with which India is gripping the imagination of contemporary designers surpasses any other influence of recent times.

jfts superiority in design, craftsmanship, and inventiveness is not new, only our awareness of Indian ingenuThe Indians once had a monopoly in the trade of fine fabrics, and in weaving, printing, and dying skills.

Their dominance was broken only after the British Government, in order to protect its own growing textile industries of the-eighteenth century, stopped the import of patterned cloth from India. .. Indian ’ cottons are now being exported and appreciated all over the world.

Cotton is a native yarn of India, and known to have been grown and woven into cloth there for at least 5000 years.

The Romans were good customers for these cottons, especially fine Dacca muslin which they described as “webs of wind.” After Vascoe da Gama found the sea route around the Cape of Good Hope to the west coast of India, in 1498, Indian textiles began to find their way to Europe. Indian cottons were sought after in Britain, particularly those that were . patterned or painted in colours. Not only were they delightful to look at, but their dyes were fast and superior to anything then being produced in England. Their secret of making dyes fast was that, they used a variety of fixatives or mordants in conjunction with their own natural fast indigo and madder which they imported from Egypt ana Arabia. The dyers painted or block

printed the colour on'to the fabric, and it not only adhered to the fabric, but penetrated through it. : Calico was one of the most common cottons imported into England. It gets '-its name from the town of Calicut on the south-west coast of India. The Malabar coast was a natural arrival point for sailing ships coming both from the Mediterranean and via the Cape of Good Hope. Gingham started life as the Hindi word “guingan,” and was applied to a cloth hand-woven from a mixture of cotton and tussah silk, in equal proportions of thread to form a check. Today’s gingham, as we know it, is all cotton woven

in solid equal checks of dyed and undyed thread; usually in primary colours. Chintz is perhaps the most fascinating word to come into our language from India. It derives from the Hindi word “chint,” meaning spotted or variegated. Early merchants ordering their fabric to meet English demand would prefer to them as “chints,” plural, thus chintz was born. Glazing, which brings up the colours, was discovered accidentally by an English experimental dyer in the nineteenth century. Seersucker originally referred to an Indian, blue and white, vertically striped

cotton. The word is a corruption of Persian words “shir a shakkar,” meaning milk and sugar. . ; - Persian culture, through trade and invasion over the centuries, had a big influence on the Indian language. “The word ‘dungaree, from the Hindi word ‘dungri,’ is well known as the name of hard-wearing cotton twill similar to denim, although the name has come to refer to the overalls which are made from this fabric. Another clothing name which came to us via India was “pyjama” from the two Persian words “pai” and “jamah,” literally meaning leg clothing.

Khaki, the colour, was invented in India at a handweaving factory in Calicut by a German dye expert working there in the nineteenth century. He decided to work on a colour which would provide camouflage in the jungle for big game hunters, having in mind the top British brass, and Indian maharajahs. He called it “khaki,” a Hindi word meaning ashes or dust, which aptly describes it. The original khaki cloth was a cotton drill. When the British army took up the cloth, records show that the khaki uniforms were first worn in 1848.