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Dyeing The Springtime: The Art And Poetry Of Fleeting Textile Colors In Medieval And Early Modern South Asia, Sylvia W. Houghteling

History of Art Faculty Research and Scholarship

This paper explores the metaphorical and material significance of short-lived fabric dyes in medieval and early modern South Asian art, literature, and religious practice. It explores dyers’ manuals, paintings, textiles, and mercantile and devotional poetry to demonstrate how the existence of ephemeral dyes opened up possibilities for mutability that cannot be found within more stable, mineral pigments, set down on paper in painting. While the relationship between the image and the word in South Asian art is most often mutually enhancing, the relationship between words and color, and particularly between poetry and dye color, operates on a much more slippery …