Shelly Jyoti
INDIGO : THE ‘BLUE GOLD’:
From Plantation, Trade to Migration, Forced Labor and Colonization
A textile artist, fashion designer, and independent curator, Shelly Jyoti is an acclaimed artist from India who has exhibited her works worldwide. Besides being an artist, she is also trained in fashion design and has earned a graduate degree in American literature. But what sets her apart from contemporaries is her passion for indigo. Since 2008, Shelly has consistently used indigo for her artistic exploration and as a medium to tell the stories of India, its colonial history, and the rich culture that unites the people.
In this interview, Shelly Jyoti talks about how she fell in love with indigo, how it shaped the history of the Indian subcontinent, and her sources of inspiration for her upcoming exhibition, “Indigo: The Blue Gold,” which will be on display from July 22, 2023, onwards at the South Asia Institute.
Read excerpts.
Your exploration of indigo began in 2008. Can you summarize the journey of how you went to use the plant for your artistic exploration and what made you fall in love with it?
In 2008, I collaborated with Chicago-based American-Japanese artist Laura Kina in a two-person exhibition titled ‘Indigo Narratives’. As an Indian artist, my reference point was the 19th-century indigo revolt in eastern India, known as Neel bidroh. Beginning in the mid-18th century, Indian cultivators began cultivating indigo on a vast scale in eastern India. Farmers in Eastern India’s Bihar were forced to grow indigo crops to satisfy the Western market for the dye, which made British traders significant profit. Still, they required unspeakable conditions, which came at a tremendous cost to their health and well-being. As an artist, my works take up socio-political narratives inspired by a play, Neel Darpan (1857), written by Bengali writer Deen Bandhu Mitra and by Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi’s intervention on behalf of exploited indigo cultivators in Champaran, Bihar in 1917-18. Gandhi’s Champaran Satyagraha was his first organized movement on Indian soil following his return from South Africa.
For “Indigo Narratives: The Blue Gold, " I explored the possibilities of indigo as a plant color and dye. As a designer, my passion for traditional Indian textiles propelled me to explore the ajrakh (Arabic: indigo) textile traditions. I was assisted in this process by Juned Ismail Katri, the son of Dr. Ismail Bhai Katri, a master craftsman well known for his ajrakh designs. I created my first artworks with Indigo using ajrakh and in the process discovered the magic of reverse block printing techniques using natural dyes that may be traced back to the Indus Valley civilization (3300-1300 BCE). Since I began my journey with indigo in 2008, the woodblock and the reverse dye process has become one of my primary means of artistic expression.
How has Indigo changed the history of the Indian subcontinent? What value did it carry before, and how much has it evolved?
Indigo (indigofera tinctoria) has a long history in India and worldwide. Since the ancient period, it has been cultivated in India, Egypt, Peru, and East Asia. Although indigo today is most closely associated with the dye, in ancient times, it was also used for medicinal purposes in many societies. The Greek name for the dye translates to “Indian dye,” suggesting that it was closely associated with the Indian subcontinent in the era of Alexander the Great. In the early modern period, Spanish explorers and traders discovered a related plant species in Central America and later cultivated it in Mexico. Indigo was later introduced in the American Colonies, where its value amounted to more than one-third of the total value of exports before the Revolutionary War.'
The European appetite for the intense blue made possible with Indian indigo transformed the lives of agriculturalists in Bihar and Bengal by the mid-18th century when the (English) East India Company began cultivating it on a mass scale. English traders and Indian businesses amassed wealth thanks to its value in global trade. Indigo cultivators, however, were impoverished gradually by the intensity of its cultivation, which over only several generations deprived them of other crops needed to supply rice and pulses required for their diet. Indigo also had detrimental effects on the quality of the soil, rendering it unfit for cultivation. Eventually, the Indigo cash cropping led to a series of political uprisings, first led by peasants and local elites and later by nationalists, including Mohandas Gandhi. Not only did indigo change the economic livelihood of India in the 19th century, it eventually became an anti-colonial issue that garnered political support challenging British colonial domination in the 20th century.
“The European appetite for the intense blue made possible with Indian indigo transformed the lives of agriculturalists in Bihar and Bengal by the mid-18th century when the (English) East India Company began cultivating it on a mass scale. ”
Now, let’s come to the real talk — your upcoming exhibition. Through the exhibit “Indigo: The Blue Gold,” at South Asia Institute, you have attempted to explore the colonial history of the natural indigo dye from trade, migration to forced labor, and colonization. What inspired you to choose this complex theme for the exhibit?
I continue to be influenced by the ideas of Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948), particularly those of community and interconnectedness. A focus on indigo allows the visitors and me to the exhibition to explore the beauty that is possible through global trade and artistic interaction. My ajrakh pieces are a positive outcome of collaboration across time, space, and communities. At the same time, it was critical to Gandhi that people understand that the things they take for granted have complex implications for our duty towards one another. Take, for example, the ubiquitous pair of blue jeans. It is an object readily found in the closets of men and women in Chicago, Santiago, Durban, Tokyo, and New Delhi. But how did the blue jean come to occupy this position globally ? Gandhi would encourage us to think concretely about production and consumption and, in doing so, to begin to understand the cost of that everyday object in our closet. The indigo that made jeans blue required forced cultivation, exploitative trading terms, colonial oppression, and indentured labor migration.
It was 2008 when Shelly Jyoti began working with Indigo.
What do you want to achieve through this exhibit? What should be the most significant takeaway for the visitors?
I want visitors to the exhibition to know a couple of things. First, I’d like them to learn something about India’s vibrant textile traditions. Not only does the show use ajrakh as a process, but it will also introduce visitors to India's colors, patterns, motifs, and needlework. Second, I’d like visitors to come away with a deeper understanding of something they likely take for granted. In the West, Indigo is most commonly associated with blue jeans rather than with the human exploitation upon which the global indigo trade depended. Today, indigo continues to have deep resonances with modern India’s post-colonial identity because of its ties to India’s colonial domination and its emergence from that experience as a growing global economic power. A large part of the story I want to tell is about traditional textile arts and how they continue to serve as a means of cultural resistance, expression, and reconstitution.
This question is out of the syllabus, but can you tell us what’s the best and worst about being a textile artist?
Sadly, many viewers do not at first recognize that I am not just making ajrakh cloth as it has been made for hundreds of years but that I am using traditional motifs and patterns in new ways for a contemporary context. To me, the choice of each block is the story that I intend to narrate through printing and dyeing. I think that it is challenging to be a contemporary textile artist who pushes the boundaries of traditional methods, colors, and motifs so that they achieve something new.
The reverse dye process of Ajrakh requires thinking about solids and voids in a very challenging way. Being able to envision the ideal outcome and colors being able to execute the steps needed to reach that outcome in the correct order is particularly hard with the number of colors I am using.
Work requires periods of very intensive work in a week to two weeks at a time to create the design on cloth. Ajrakh is an intensive process that I cannot simply undertake in a studio in New Delhi. It requires not only the 400-year-old wood blocks of a master craftsperson but also the space and other assistance of experts at each stage in the process. Mixing the resin, resin application, drying, dyeing, washing, reapplication, and additional dyeing. Even after the cloth is printed, substantial finishing work is needed to enhance the pieces.