Page:The People of India — a series of photographic illustrations, with descriptive letterpress, of the races and tribes of Hindustan Vol 4.djvu/53

 DYERS. (183)

HE trade of dyeing is universal throughout India, and is carried on both by Hindoos and Mahomedans, apart, or in combination, as shown in the Photograph. In this picture, the standing figure, who is rubbing the mixed dye stuff through a cloth to strain it, is a Hindoo. The sitting figures—that is, the person who is wringing out a piece of cloth, and he who has a wooden mallet in his hand, beating a cloth, in order to equalize the colours—are Mussulmans. The materials for the trade, as will be perceived, are very simple. A few large pans for mixing the dyes, trestles for supporting the straining cloth, and a press, are all that are used in the simple operations of the craft. Hindoo dyers are of the Sudra class, on an equality with weavers and other similar artizans, and they are much more numerous than the Mahomedans, and, on the whole, better workmen. The craft is hereditary; and the secrets of mixtures of colours, methods of extracting the dyes, of the use of mordants, and of producing every variety of tint that may be necessaiy, descend from father to son, and have perhaps been little changed in the course of ages. It is evident that the art of dyeing is one of great antiquity in India. In descriptions of garments worn by males and females in the Mahabharat, colours are defined which could only be produced by dyes; and in the pictures on the walls of the Buddhist cave temples of Adjunta, garments of many colours are shown, as well as coloured borders and ends to white cloths. These paintings, it is true, are of a much later date, even by a thousand years, than the poem of the Mahabharat; but are still valuable specimens of the dresses and their colours in use in India from the second century before the Christian era, to the eighth or tenth century after it. Although not so brilliant, perhaps, as the dyes used in Europe, yet the colours produced by the Indian dyer are for the most part very pure and beautiful. They are of two kinds: one permanent, and used in fabrics which have to bear constant washing; the other fleeting, and intended for temporary use only. In the former category are the yarns for weaving both silk and cotton cloths; in the latter, white cloths, such as muslin,