The climbing shrub M. umbellata, which has long pointed leaves, is widespread. It grows from India and Sri Lanka to China and Japan, as well as Southeast Asia, Indonesia and northern Australia. Its roots can be used for dyeing. In Malaysia it is called mengkudu akar or mengkudu hutan (morinda root or forest morinda), while M. citrifolia is referred to as mengkudu besar (Quattrocchi 1999, 1730).
Rumphius described how the residents of Ambon produced a colourful stable dye by taking the bark from the thickest roots of M. citrifolia var. braceata and mixing it with a third part of leha leaves and bark (Symplocos) or a little alum (Heyne 1917, vol. 4, 208). Merchants occasionally shipped this Ambonese morinda to Java. Apparently the Malays and Javanese made an even better red dye by mixing the root bark with sappan or other red dyewoods.
morinda
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M. citrifolia is widespread and was cultivated in the past in Bengal, Orissa, and Burma. It was often allowed to grow as a weed near the homesteads of native weavers who made use of it for dyeing their manufactured fabrics (Dunstan 1903, 209). At that time the roots of the various species of morinda were becoming an increasingly important red dye, gradually supplanting the more expensive chay root. The most common mordants were tannic acid and alum, producing a range of colours varying from reddish-yellow, through pink and various shades of red, to dark brown.
Benjamin Heyne noted that while cotton was dyed with chay root on the Indian coast, the Gentoos of Mysore used M. umbellata, which grew prolifically in the surrounding jungle (Heyne 1814, 91). In the village of Sarti, cotton was first steeped in sesame oil and then immersed in a strong ley of euphorbia ash for four successive nights, being dried in the sun during the day. After washing, the cotton was immersed overnight in a pot of water containing powdered togaru (morinda root) heated over a fire of cow dung. In the morning it was dried in the sun. This cycle was repeated for a further two days. The result was a dirty crimson.
Sir Thomas Wardle studied four species of Indian morinda but struggled to reproduce the colours obtained by Indian dyers. With M. citrifolia he could only obtain yellows and oranges but not red. With M. angustifolia he obtained reddish yellows, brownish reds and dull reds on both silk and cotton (Wardle 1887; Dunstan 1903, 209).
The pan-tropical distribution of the dye source M. citrifolia var. bracteata and the medically useful M. citrifolia var. citrifolia suggests that both were present in the Indonesian archipelago well before the arrival of modern humans over 40,000 years ago. It is impossible to say exactly how long morinda has been exploited as a dye, but the use of similar regional terms such as bangkudu, cangkudu, mengkudu and wungkudu across the entire archipelago does suggest that the species has been exploited for a very long time.
More reliable historical evidence indicates that morinda dyeing in the form that we know it today was well-established in both Java and Bali by the ninth century AD. Javanese sima charters dating from the early tenth century list taxable commercial activities, one of which was dyeing. One example is the Alasantan inscription of 939 found in East Java. These records show that on Java the two most important dyestuffs at that time were indigo and wungkudu, the latter being the Old Javanese term for morinda (Christie 1993, 186). General peddlers were important middlemen who brought cotton, spun yarn and wungkudu roots to the markets. Also important were the producers of ash, pressers of oil and burners of lime, the latter also for use in betel chewing.
Wungkudu dye processing is also mentioned in Balinese charters dating from the early ninth century onwards. The inscription from the village of Sukawana in Kintamani district, dated 883 AD, exempted local monks from paying taxes on various occupations, including indigo dyeing, mangnila, and morinda dyeing, mamangkudu (Stewart-Fox 1993, 87-88). A second inscription from the village of Bwahan in Kintamani, dated 995, records that wungkudu did not occur in that village. Finally the inscription from Tengkulak close to Ubud, dated 1024, gives the villagers of Songan Tambahan permission to cut down morinda trees, which were otherwise protected. In the twelfth century, trees considered to be of special quality on Bali included wungkudu, jirak (Symplocos fasiculata) and kamiri (candlenut) (Stein Callenfels 1926, 1-6).
According to Marsden, the morinda tree was known as bangkudu in some districts of Sumatra and mangkudu in others (Marsden 1811, 95). He claimed that the roots of M. umbellata were used for dyeing and that the broader-leaved M. citrifolia did not yield any colouring matter, despite having specified M. citrifolia as a dye plant some years earlier (Marsden 1784, 78). The dried roots were pounded and boiled in alkaline water made from the ash of coconut fruit stalks and leaf midribs. Sometimes the bark or wood of sappan was added to the dye bath. Anderson found that mangkudu root was used as a dye in the Langkat region of east Sumatra, although the trees were mainly planted as a support for pepper vines (Anderson 1826, 249 and 261). The Toba Batak used two types of bangkudu differentiated by region: bangkudu Toba and bangkudu Pahea. The latter was higher quality and therefore more expensive (Jasper and Pirngadie 1912, 69).
According to John Crawfurd (1820, 463), two species of mangkudu (Morinda) were found abundantly in every part of the Indian archipelago, but only the roots of the small-leaved variety (which he described as M. umbellata) were suitable for dyeing. That from the eastern islands was considered superior to that from the western islands, which is why morinda from Ambon was exported to Java.
The head of the Museum of Economic Botany at Bogor (formerly Buitenzorg) in West Java confirmed in 1917 that morinda from Ambon was still being exported to Java (Heyne 1917, vol. IV, 207-214). In Maluku the natives used the bark of the thickest roots and mixed them with leha leaves (Symplocos) or alum. However the Malays and Javanese achieved a deeper red by the addition of sappan or some other red bark wood.
On Sumatra morinda is classified as a low altitude beach forest species, growing along sandy coastlines (Laumonier 1997, 129), especially on the west coast. On Java morinda grows wild around the coast and is cultivated at lower elevations inland. In the nineteenth century there were plantations in coastal areas of northern Java and the adjoining islands (Hofmann-de Keijzer and van Bommel 2005, 71). One of the largest plantations was on the Karimonjawa Islands, located to the north of Java (Heyne 1917, vol. IV, 209). Batik workshops at Pekalongan could buy three types of morinda bark in 1912: locally harvested, from Buitenzorg in West Java, or imported from Maluku (Heyne 1917, 211).
It has been suggested that the process of morinda dyeing in Indonesia is of Indian origin, since it was found in textiles with Indian design features (Bühler 1941, 1423-1426). Bühler later suggested that its centre of origin was probably the Coromandel Coast, where it reached its highest perfection, and that the technique became progressively degraded the further it spread eastward, thus explaining why it was so greatly modified in Indonesia (Bühler 1948, 2504). Others have suggested that it was introduced to Indonesia on the back of Indian trade, the Indians having adopted it in turn from the Middle East (Gittinger 1979, 169; Fraser-Lu 1988, 29). It is hard to find evidence for any of this, apart from some weak linguistic links. Firstly the principle natural mordant used in the morinda dyeing process, Symplocos, is termed lodhra in Sanskrit and loba in some but not all parts of Indonesia. Secondly the kingdom of Kediri, which was contemporaneous with the Srivijaya Empire on Sumatra, is thought to have taken its name from khadri, the Sanskrit word for morinda. Based in the Brantas River valley, it controlled much of East Java from 1042 to around 1222. This very same region became one of the main Javanese centres for morinda dyeing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Obviously the common Indian name for morinda, aal, is totally different to the Malay terms bengkudu or bangkudu and mengkudu or mangkudu, while the Javanese, who have had more intense trading links with Arabia and India, refer to Symplocos as jirak or jirek. Furthermore the morinda dyeing process in India is considerably different to that found in Eastern Indonesia. Indian dyers frequently used creamy milk instead of oil or alternatively castor or sesame oil; derived their alkali from carbonate of soda or the ashes of plantain; and placed more emphasis on the addition of tannin-rich substances such as plant galls and myrobalan (Napier 1869, 357; Bühler 1948, 2500; Mohanty et al 1987, 11-8). Occasionally they omitted the oiling stage altogether. It seems just as likely to us that the Indonesian morinda-dyeing process could have developed independently, using locally available plant materials.
There has been no systematic island-wide survey of Morinda across the Lesser Sunda Islands, although it has been recorded on specific islands. For example, on Bali morinda has been found to grow in open places close to the sea or in mangroves, while being cultivated on land below 200m in altitude (Heim 2015, 194). On Flores it grows in hot areas close to sea level (Hamilton 1994, 62). However it is not found at higher altitudes, which explains its absence around the weaving villages of Ngada (Hamilton 1994, 66). Meanwhile on Savu, Duggan has identified the presence of two species, samples of which have been identified by botanists at the Bogor Herbarium as M. citrifolia and M. tomentosa (Duggan 2001, 32 and 87). The former is known locally as kebo hida and is the species preferred for dyeing. On islands such as Savu, which have a long dry season, morinda trees sometimes struggle to survive from rainy season to rainy season. 2ff7e9595c
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