Dyeing the Springtime: The Art and Poetry of Fleeting Textile Colors in Medieval and Early Modern South Asia

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 popular 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 basis. In the visual and literary arts of South Asia, dye colors offered textile artists and poets alike a palette of vibrant hues and a way to capture shifts in emotions and modes of devotion that retained a sense of impermanence. More broadly, these fragile, fleeting dye materials reaffirm the importance of tracing the local and regional histories even of objects, like textiles, that circulated globally.

Reading Visually: Can Art Historical Reading Approaches go Digital?

As the field of digital humanities grows, scholars are translating and adapting their investigative processes to suit the digital environs. Questions about how digital technologies will enhance and transform historical scholarly reading practices have arisen, but they have not been extensively considered from the perspective of visual culture historians and less so from those working on select non-Western cultures. This paper approaches these questions from an Islamic and South Asian art historical perspective, mapping out the particularities of reading historical texts when conducting visual cultural research and considering the implications for the development of future digital research tools.