Cottons

There are twenty three varieties of cotton grown in India. The cotton plant belongs to the genus Gossypium of the family Malvaceae. It is generally a shrubby plant having broad three-lobed leaves and seeds in capsules, or bolls; each seed is surrounded with downy fiber, white or creamy in color and easily spun. The fibers flatten and twist naturally as they dry.

Long before Hargreave’s ‘cotton gin’ and ‘power looms’ and Cartwrights ‘spinning frame’, fabric manufacture in India was, for centuries, village based and handspun. It relied on handlooms that used cotton yarn or, the himroo yarn (an admixture of cotton and silk) to form the grids patterns of warp and woof. Alongside weaving, the techniques for dying using madder and indigo was also developed. Nila tinted the cloth indigo blue. Lac provided the red, iron shavings combined with vinegar gave black and turmeric was used for yellow. Dark green was derived when pomegranate rind was combined with indigo.