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Paper short abstract

This paper examines indigo as a natural dye, highlighting artisanal alternatives to toxic industrial dyeing. It argues these practices reframe resilience through more-than-human, decolonial environmental justice.

Paper long abstract

The contemporary green transition is frequently framed through techno-managerial solutions that prioritise innovation, efficiency, and scalability, yet such approaches often marginalise alternative epistemologies and lived practices. This paper contributes to debates on environmental justice and “resilient futures” by bringing a more-than-human perspective to indigo-based practices in South Asia, foregrounding indigo as a natural dye and a regenerative alternative to chemically intensive and toxic dyeing processes.

Historically constructed as a colonial plantation commodity shaped by extractive regimes and later displaced by synthetic dyes, indigo is typically situated within linear narratives of industrial progress and decline. Drawing on historical sources and ethnographic engagement with contemporary artisanal and ecological practices, this paper challenges such accounts by tracing indigo’s persistence and reconfiguration across time. Rather than a residual practice, indigo emerges as a site of ongoing entanglement among human actors (farmers, dyers, artisans) and more-than-human actors (plants, soil, water, microbes, and climatic forces), while also offering materially grounded alternatives to polluting industrial dye systems.

Engaging decolonial, feminist, and Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholarship, the paper reframes resilience as an emergent outcome of situated and negotiated relations rather than a property achieved through external intervention. In doing so, it highlights how artisanal practices challenge dominant framings of the green transition by foregrounding epistemic plurality and more-than-human worlds. The paper argues that just and resilient futures require not only inclusion but a redistribution of epistemic authority, recognising more-than-human worlds as central to sustainable transitions.