Colours From Koraput Forests And The Adivasi Women Reviving Natural Dyeing
A slow and painstaking craft once linked the Adivasi communities of Odisha to their surrounding forests. It nearly died but now a group of young women are piecing it back together
At the break of dawn, as the forests around Koraput in southern Odisha awaken to mynah’s songs, bamboo and sal leaves rustle in the breeze and mahua flowers drop gently to the forest floor. By 8am, the forest trails see a different rhythm— young women, in their early 20s, walking in silent groups, a tangia (a scraping tool) slung over their shoulders. They scan the tree trunks as they move, gathering fallen leaves.
Lachma Kantari, 22, from Santeiput village kneels under an alder tree, her fingers grazing its rough bark. Gangei Chalan, 19, from Purnaguda examines the sal leaves, trying to recall their names in Odia that her grandmother taught her. The women then move on to trace a fine curl of bark with their tangia, careful not to cut too deep. Soon their cloth bags are full with fragrant leaves, barks, flowers, and seeds.
Which tree bark yields rust browns, which flower produces a golden hue, and which fruit peel turns crimson – this is part of the traditional knowledge that was once integral to the Adivasi community’s natural dyeing skills. Lachma and Gangei are among the growing number of young women in Koraput reviving this lost art which died with the degradation of local forests and the arrival of chemical dyes and mechanised weaving.
By relearning how to draw reds, yellows, and greens from the local flora, they are not only reclaiming their heritage but also creating livelihoods rooted in sustainability, forest protection, and climate resilience.
Synthetic dyeing, cheaper and readily available, has severe environmental impacts. Studies show that the global textile industry, generating around USD 1 trillion annually and employing 35 million people, remains one of the largest industrial polluters.
Synthetic dyes, often petrochemical derivatives, contain heavy metals like chromium and lead. The dyeing process consumes vast quantities of water and releases untreated effluents into rivers. These effluents carry high biochemical and chemical oxygen demand levels, reducing photosynthesis, lowering dissolved oxygen, and acting as toxic, mutagenic, and carcinogenic pollutants that biomagnify across food chains. As much as 15–50% of azo dyes remain unbound and enter wastewater, harming soil microbes and stunting plant growth.
Reviving Forgotten Colours
By the time Lachma and Gangei were born, weaving and natural dyeing were little more than a part of rural folklore. “Our mothers and grandmothers spoke of it while weaving baskets or plucking rice,” Gangei recalls. “But we never saw it ourselves.”
The Paraja, Kondh, Gadaba, Durua, Bhumia, and Saora are some of the major tribes of the Koraput region. Weaving and dyeing was integral to their cultural identity, especially among the Gadabas, known for their kerang sarees woven on backstrap looms.
The older women we interviewed said the sarees were predominantly white. Over time, colours drawn from plants and mineral sources began to appear, especially red and black, along the borders.
“The colours they used back then were abundant in nature, not the fancy ones we see today,” Gangei recalls her grandmother telling her.
Koraput had as many as 10,000 tribal artisans, dyers, weavers, and spinners, most of them women before it was bifurcated in 1992 into four districts, says Anuradha Kandala, a researcher and the director of Folkweave Koraput, a social enterprise that is working to revive the weaving and natural dyeing heritage of the region.
“For generations, the forest has been their loom, providing not just fibre and dye, but also the songs of the spindle under tamarind trees, the folktales,” she says. “Weaving is not merely economic activity, it is an expression of gratitude to the forest, a way of wearing their landscape upon their bodies.”
Painstaking Process
Once the dye materials were collected, the colours would be cooked, used to dye the yarn, and eventually sell the finished product. It was a subsistence-based and independent economy, Anuradha points out. But when brighter, cheaper and easier to use chemical colours entered the markets, people began to quickly adopt them. At the local weekly market, machine-made sarees quickly replaced the hand crafted ones.
Women who lived off the art of dyeing and weaving were forced to migrate to brick kilns and construction sites in cities in the 1990s even as cooperative weaving collectives dwindled, says Anuradha.
“We always knew the forest hid so many colours. The community just needed some support to learn the processes properly and use them in our weaving,” says Shibani Mishra, who works with communities on natural dyes and other creative aspects of their craft.
The revival began two years ago, initiated by Folkweave Koraput.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, when the lockdown forced migrants to return home, many women began to look at their abandoned looms and dyeing sheds once again. They coined the slogan: ‘Parampara, parivesh banchao au seitharu paisa pao (save our traditions and environment, and make a living too).’
“I dropped out of school after class 10. Most young women around me migrated for work. I also took up some odd daily wage work and also did some basic stitching work,” Gangei says of her early life. “The idea of learning about natural dyeing intrigued me. It felt as if childhood stories were coming to life as we entered a new world that was also deeply rooted.”
Organic, Minimum Waste
The dyeing calendar is interwoven with the forest’s natural cycles. Summer brings flowers like tesu and marigold, monsoon yields fresh bark and leaves, while winter is best for roots and seeds. The jafra seed yields a gerua reddish-orange, marigold flowers bring bright yellows, while a combination of jaggery and iron produces rich shades of black and grey. Onion peels give up subtle hues of red and purple, and so on. Different combinations and processing techniques create entirely new shades.
In small dyeing sheds, cotton yarns hang from bamboo poles, dripping streaks of ochre, moss green, and burnt orange onto the mud floor below. The process is slow and laborious.
“First, the white threads are soaked in plain water for a whole day,” Lachma tells us, as she dips her wrinkled hands into a large earthen pot. “Then we mix cow dung and castor oil, and soak the threads in it for two to three days. This ensures that the colour sticks better and doesn’t fade with time.”
The yarn is then rinsed and dried and then the process of dyeing begins. Dye baths are prepared by boiling bark or flower powders with water in wide iron pots over wood fire. As they cook, they release strong herbal aromas that envelope the shed. The yarn is dipped repeatedly into the baths, left to soak, sometimes overnight, until it takes on the desired hue. It is, then, carefully sun-dried on bamboo frames for several days for the colour to set.
“From start to finishIt takes 20-25 days,” Lachma says. “But when I see the final colour, I feel proud. This is our forest. These are our colours.“ It is not the forests alone: women are now exploring ways to use waste materials— onion peels, pomegranate rinds– to create earthy reds and purples.
Forests and Dyes
Koraput, nestled among the Eastern Ghats, is a region abundant in biodiversity: 45% of its total land area is under forests, according to a 1989 survey conducted by the Forest Survey of India. But data from Global Forest Watch reveals that between 2002 and 2023, the district lost 759 hectares of humid primary forest, losing 9.5% of its total tree cover.
Studies show that human activities, coupled with severe climatic events, fires, pest attacks, diseases, and other environmental disturbances, degrade forests over time. In Odisha, research shows the forest loss is particularly concentrated in mining districts such as Koraput. Mining in Koraput, and the Damanjodi refinery are intensifying ecological vulnerability in these regions.
“Earlier, grazing lands were nearby. Now, we have to walk far. The grasses have gone, forests are thinner,” says Bhagamati Sisa from Raipada village who is in her late 60s.
In some of the villages where these young women are reviving natural dyeing, women had been mapping their commons – including, land, water and forest resources as we reported earlier. This revealed the scale of loss of trees that are central to the art of dyeing.
“During the mapping, we realised that the kerang plant, whose bark was traditionally used to make fabrics worn by the Gadaba tribal women, had almost disappeared. Even the palash trees are not easily available,” says Pratima Gadaba, 23, from Atipatna village. They have to walk for several kilometers to find the trees like bahada (Terminalia bellerica), harada (Terminalia chebula), jafara (Myrobalan), al (Morinda), and acacia catechu that were once commonplace.
Mapping also led to some surprising discoveries. For instance, they found an abundance of Senna plants which could make a natural black colour.
But as the women reclaim the craft and plant trees like harda, they are conscious about what it means to climate action. They are planting trees like harda but are also conscious about how much they harvest. “My grandmother told me, use only strong trees and don’t disturb the young ones. If we kill the tree, how will it give colour next year?” Gangei says.
“Scrape a little less of the alder than what you need,” Lachma recalls her grandmother saying. “We realise, if our forests go, our colours go. If colours go, our tradition and work goes too,” she says.
[This story is part of a new series “Climate Leaders: Women in Local Climate Action”, a collaboration between Womanity and Behanbox.]
All the stories in the series can be read here.
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