Sylvia W. Houghteling

This book project explores fleeting textile dyes that were shared across South Asia and the Indonesian archipelago in order to reconstitute an alternative framework for thinking about time and the durability of fabric and other resources from the natural world. The long-distance colonial trade with Europe of the early modern period fixated on stabilization. This book introduces practices that placed a high value on materials that were seasonal and biodegradable, and that saw merit in renewing a faded cloth by re-dyeing it. The lost colors of textiles are part of the memory of a cloth and point to cultural connections, plant ecologies, and artisanal practices that rarely surface otherwise.

In 1700, figural patterns disappeared from South Asian cloth. Coinciding with the rise of European trade and the breakdown of the Mughal Empire, the loss of human imagery marked the end of an era of cultural contact through luxury textiles. This dissertation examines textiles from the preceding century, arguing that seventeenth-century cloths bearing images of people had once shaped cultural norms and connected distant courtly spaces. In studying the local and regional trade in seventeenth-century Indian textiles, this project reveals three broader facets of early modern South Asia: the existence of inter-regional networks of cultural exchange, the cosmopolitanism of the South Asian elite, and the active participation of cloth in the politics and pageantry of courtly life.