Dyeing Brown with Cutch — The Acacia Heartwood Dye of the Indian Subcontinent

Use 20-40% WOF of cutch extract for a medium to deep brown. For 100 g of wool, weigh out 20-40 g of cutch. Cutch is sold as dark brown blocks, chunks, or powder — all forms work equally well. The blocks are hard and dense, resembling dark chocolate. Higher quantities give deeper, richer brown; lower quantities give warm cinnamon-tan. Because cutch is a concentrated extract, much less is needed than with raw bark dyes.

Break the cutch into small pieces if using blocks, then dissolve in 4 litres of hot water in the dye pot. Stir until fully dissolved — this may take 10-15 minutes. Cutch powder dissolves faster than blocks. The resulting dye bath is a deep, rich brown — opaque and concentrated. Unlike bark dyes that require hours of simmering to extract, cutch is pre-extracted and ready to use as soon as it dissolves. This is the advantage of working with a prepared extract.

Pre-wet the alum-mordanted wool, squeeze out excess, and lower it into the cutch dye bath at room temperature. Slowly raise to 85°C over 30 minutes, then hold for 45 minutes. Turn gently every 10 minutes. Cutch tannins bond strongly to both mordanted and unmordanted wool — but alum-mordanted wool produces warmer, richer cinnamon-brown tones. Unmordanted wool gives a cooler, greyer brown. The bath will pale as the wool absorbs the dye.

Turn off the heat and let the wool cool in the bath overnight. Remove, squeeze gently, and rinse in lukewarm water until the runoff is mostly clear. The final colour on alum-mordanted wool is a warm, rich cinnamon to chocolate brown — the colour of the original khaki military fabric. Cutch brown is one of the most permanent natural dye colours: it has excellent washfastness, excellent lightfastness, and the colour actually deepens slightly with age and repeated washing. An iron afterbath darkens cutch brown to deep charcoal or near-black. Dry in shade.

Cutch-dyed fabric changed military history. When British forces in India needed a practical uniform colour that did not show dust and dirt, they adopted the cutch-dyed cotton of local troops — khaki. The word entered English during the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and by the Second Boer War (1899-1902), khaki had replaced the conspicuous red and blue uniforms of European armies worldwide. The dye that made this possible was cutch — cheap, fast, permanent, and the perfect colour for camouflage in arid landscapes. Cutch also preserved fishing nets across Southeast Asia, waterproofed sails in the Indian Ocean, and dyed the cotton sarongs of Malay and Indonesian textile traditions.