Meghalaya is a land of spectacular natural beauty, green hilly region of thick pine jungles and dense bamboo groves and broom grass that grows in the wild. Bus loads leave every day, carrying this grass to every corner of the country, where it is used to create brooms for domestic use.
I spent a day at Kong Kwikstar Tmung’s home, where she and her friend Kong Syngkli demonstrated natural dyeing processes, creating beautiful shades of yellow, pink, purple, reds, and greys, using herbs, flowers, leaves picked from her back yard. It was a treat to watch them pluck leaves and flowers, crush, pound and boil them to produce some interesting shades. Soda ash and local soap (sabon lieh) was used for degumming the yarn before dyeing. Sohkhu leaves, beetnut (arecanut), diengrnong bark were used as mordants, which helped the yarn to absorb the dye. Turmeric was used for shades of yellow, lac for shades of pinks and purples.
For a lovely shade of grey, Kong Kwikstar plucked Sohtung leaves from her garden, weighed 50 grams and crushed the leaves. She plucked rose flower, weighed 100 grams and pounded this. These were boiled together with Sohksain (black berry), plucked from her garden, together along with 100 grams of iron ore powder (bought from Cherapunji town). This concoction was strained and degummed, washed 100 gms. eri silk hanks were immersed in this solution, and boiled for half an hour. The hanks were turned around for even colour absorption to get a beautiful shade of grey. Replacing the rose flower with either hibiscus or cotton tree flower, both red flowers, would give distinctly different, beautiful shades of grey. By evening we were joking that every red flower can give a beautiful shade of grey.
Kong Kwikstar narrated an interesting story. A few years back, a workshop was conducted in their village thru a government initiative to teach them the use of chemical dyes, which would help expand their colour palate. The new dyes were easier and less laborious to use and they enjoyed the new range of colours. No one explained to them the use of hand gloves or about the hazards of the acid or other chemicals in the dyestuff. Within a few months, some of the dyers started getting rashes and the acidic smell was too strong. They also realised that the effluent that trickled into the land around their home was polluting their vegetable patch and thus the food they consumed. The women collectively decided that their health was more important and rejected the use of chemical dyes and reverted back to using their natural dyes. The women now experiment with different locally sourced herbs, leaves, barks to expand their colour palate.
