Meisen Jamir is pursuing B. Des Textile Design from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. She has completed her TDF Internship project in Nagaland on The Textiles of Ao-Naga tribe.
The TDF internship project helped her in reconnecting with her tribe in multiple ways. Some of them include exposure to the creation stories, Morung- where young males and females are taught way of living, Maotsu festival celebrated for good harvest, people with spirits as healers and various craft processes like hand painting, tattooing and shawl making. As a student of Textile Design, she learned the various types of shawl worn by people of Ao-Tribe, some of them are ‘Rich Man’s Shawl’ and shawl worn by women.
Through the project Meisen explored that the dyes for the fabrics are extracted from many things in nature; like Osak-used for indigo colour, Aozu-used for red colour, Mesu- gives a deep red colour and others such as Azu, Tangmo, Tangshi, wild mint, ginger, coarse grass blade and lemon are also used in the process of dyeing. When picking up the plants for dyeing, one must be very mindful from where they are plucking as it greatly affects the shade to be either lighter or darker. While dyeing certain guidelines should be followed to avoid misfortunes. For indigo dyeing the whole process is done by women because it is believed that if men do it then their skills of hunting and fishing would go away. Then the process of making the dyes consists of pounding the leaves into paste, spreading them on a mat to dry, etc. but if the colour does not comes out satisfactorily then the whole process can be done again. To fix the dye lemon and/or ash is used. Meisen in her project wanted to emphasize on the point of preserving the craft, mainly focusing on keeping the essence of indigo dyeing. There are many problems when taking this up, as there is little income and no marketing platform for it. She then came up with the idea of adding more value to it with ‘The Blue Indigo’ and has come up with tentative design motifs-which are easy and pleasing to the eyes. She also came up with some design layouts that can be put to use and some abstract concepts which would give it a modern touch.