Ayurvastra, a Fabric from the Past with a Future

Summer Vacations were long for me. At the end of last term, after I finished my contract at a university in Nanchang, I headed home in early July, thinking I would be back in China by early September. However, it turned out be a far longer vacation running to almost twelve weeks.

My days at home were easy, relaxed and laid-back. After a long walk in the park adjoining the lakes near my home in Kolkata, as the city is now known, changed from its earlier and better-known name Calcutta, I would return home, read a couple of newspapers and browse the internet, looking for information on a variety of interesting topics and for new developments in the fields of human endeavour.

One day, while relaxing over long cups of tea, brewed with green tea shipped home from China I chanced upon an interesting article on ¡®Ayurvastra¡¯. ¡®Ayurvastra¡¯ is a compound of two words, ¡®ayur¡¯ and ¡®vastra¡¯ from an ancient Indian language called Sanskrit. While I knew that ¡®vastra¡¯ meant fabrics or clothes I was intrigued about ¡®ayur¡¯. All I could guess was it might, in some way, be connected to ¡®Ayurveda¡¯, an ancient Indian system of health and medicine. It would be the Indian equivalent of TCM or Traditional Chinese Medicine in China. While TCM has many practioners and is still widely used, the old Indian system has all but died out. It exists, but only just!

A little more research led me to understand that ¡®Ayurvastra¡¯ is a product of an ancient Indian practise of dyeing hand-made fabrics with medicinal herbs. They used different herbs and natural dyes to colour the fabrics in pastel shades but the real advantage was that those herbs and dyes helped cure a variety of diseases.

At a time when there is such a huge global outcry against chemical dyes and their harmful effects on health, with reports suggesting that some chemical dyes can even lead to dangerous diseases such as cancer, I thought ¡®Ayurvastra¡¯ with its healing properties was a great rediscovery.

After thinking about ¡®Ayurvastra¡¯ and its benificial effects on health, I decided to go and meet some of the people who were trying to regenerate an ancient system of dyeing. I hopped on to a plane operated by a budget airline and found myself in a quaint little town in southern India. I went around the town, the ¡®works¡¯ where they produce the fabrics and even to an Ayurveda College, collecting as much information as I could.

What I found there both excited me and made me wonder why such an art had been allowed to die. The answer to this question was easy enough to surmise if one glanced through India¡¯s history and the saga of domination it suffered at the hands of invaders. More pertinently, in a world where money is almost everything, such exotic arts are bound to perish in the face of competition from large multinational companies with their immense financial power. While Ayurvastra producers laboured by hand, spinning, weaving and dyeing their naturally-produced cotton and other natural fabrics, the multinational companies mass-produced synthetic or man-made and blended fabrics on state-of-art machines. Consequently, the weavers and dyers, using their old contraptions were unable to withstand the onslaught from large companies and soon their art was consigned to the graveyard and museums.

For long, the science behind Ayurvastra lay forgotten, unused and buried in ancient texts until recently, when members of a family that once practised this form of dyeing came upon those texts and regenerated the art. They took samples of their produce to the Ayurveda College which conducted tests and studies on the produce. They were pleasantly surprised to discover that Ayurvastra actually helped patients suffering from a variety of ailments.such as skin disease, high blood pressure, hypertension, diabetes and so on.

Local authorities, when they heard about Ayurvastra, stepped in and soon the intrepid members of the family found themselves in the glare of huge attention from the media and trade, both local and international. However, when they received a large order from the Saudi royal family for ¡®burqas¡¯, the head-to-toe veiled garment used by Muslim women in conservative societies, Ayurvastra became a rage in Saudi Arabia, particularly among the health-conscious. And, soon in other countries, as well.

I returned home after a few days in the land of Ayurvastra, a little enlightened and a little humbled - enlightened because I learnt about Ayurvastra in some detail and humbled because there is so much happening around us, of which we are so ignorant.

On my flight home, as the aircraft soared through cotton-like clouds I visualized celestial men spinning cotton from the clouds, weaving them by hand and then dyeing them in the natural colours of a rainbow. And, I thought to myself, if I am ever to do any business it is going to be Ayurvastra¡­

Any takers! (Interested buyers can contact: hfintl@gmail.com)