Indigo: the bluest blue
Blue Gold or Devil's Dye? The complex history of the precious blue dye with Jenny Balfour-Paul, Lucille Junkere and Andrea Sella
Indigo: not only one of the seven colours of the rainbow and the dye that makes your jeans look like they do but and a highly valued pigment which is naturally found in some plants and whose use can be traced back at least six thousand years to Peru. Such was the desirability of indigo that along with sugar, cotton, coffee and tobacco it became a major driver for globalised trade and the horrors of slavery. In India it was the source of so much exploitation that a lawyer called Gandhi rose to fame standing up for indigo farmers.
Rajan Datar explores the rich history of the dye with Jenny Balfour-Paul, an Honorary Research Fellow at Exeter University and author of Indigo: Egyptian Mummies to Blue Jeans; Lucille Junkere, an artist and textile researcher with a particular interest in the history of indigo in Nigeria and the Caribbean; and Andrea Sella, a professor of chemistry at University College London who delights his students with all kinds of colourful experiments with indigo.
Photo: Detail of adire indigo cloth from Nigeria. Credit: Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Last on
More episodes
Clip
-
The dye linking blue jeans and ancient textiles
Duration: 00:50
Broadcasts
- Thu 24 Oct 2019 08:06GMT91Èȱ¬ World Service
- Thu 24 Oct 2019 23:06GMT91Èȱ¬ World Service
- Sat 26 Oct 2019 13:06GMT91Èȱ¬ World Service News Internet
- Sun 27 Oct 2019 14:06GMT91Èȱ¬ World Service East and Southern Africa & West and Central Africa only
- Sun 27 Oct 2019 15:06GMT91Èȱ¬ World Service Australasia, Online, UK DAB/Freeview, News Internet & Europe and the Middle East only
- Mon 28 Oct 2019 03:06GMT91Èȱ¬ World Service Online & UK DAB/Freeview only
- Mon 28 Oct 2019 04:06GMT91Èȱ¬ World Service Australasia, Americas and the Caribbean, South Asia & East Asia only
Featured in...
Luxuries and obsessions—The Forum
How the world's desires were fuelled
Do you think political or business leaders need to be charismatic? Or do you prefer highly competent but somewhat stern people?
Podcast
-
The Forum
The programme that explains the present by exploring the past