The Story Behind My Father’s Signature Brown Turban
S. Vasdev Singh in San Jise, 1993
Wearing a turban is one thing; choosing, dyeing, preparing, tying, and maintaining it is an art in itself. Over the years, I have watched this art change considerably.
It begins with selecting the cloth—voile, full voile, malmal, or another texture. Then comes the color. The choice of color has always been very personal and has also varied from one region and generation to another. There was even a time when printed turbans were fashionable, particularly in the northwestern parts of pre-Partition India.
The length and style are equally important. Some prefer four-and-a-half or five yards, others six or seven, while Nihang Singhs may wear considerably longer turbans. In more recent decades, many people have started joining the cloth lengthwise with a central seam. This helps the turban sit more evenly and gives it a fuller, rounded appearance in harmony with the shape of the face.
In earlier days, almost every mohalla had its own professional dyer, commonly called a lilari. You would buy plain white turban cloth, take it to him, describe the exact shade you wanted, and he would dye and prepare it for you. Sometimes starch was added to give the cloth the desired firmness. There was also a fashion of sprinkling abrak, a fine sparkling pigment, on the turban to give it a distinctive sheen.
On Shivpreet Dastarbandhi in Jan 1989, in Jangpura Extension Gurdwara.
My father, however, often dyed his turbans himself at home. I remember watching him experimenting with colors, starting with one shade, adding another, mixing red with yellow, perhaps a little black, and adjusting the mixture until he reached the color he wanted.
There was one amusing consequence of all this experimentation. Somehow, sooner or later, almost every mixture seemed to end up as a shade of brown!
“In 1994, a Russian photographer was specially commissioned to photograph him, perhaps capturing what would become his last formal studio portrait.”
As the years passed, brown became so closely associated with him that it became his signature turban color. I sometimes wonder whether he had deliberately chosen brown at all, or whether repeated experiments with red, yellow, black, and other leftover dyes simply kept leading him there. Whatever the reason, eventually it was difficult for us to imagine him in any other color.
I too grew up having my turbans dyed by the neighborhood lilari. Those traditional dyes, however, were not always permanent. They could fade with washing, and sometimes the color would rub onto the collar or other clothes.
Today things are very different. Turban cloth is readily available in an enormous range of factory-dyed shades, with much more consistent and lasting colors. The neighborhood lilari, once such a familiar figure in our lives, has almost disappeared.
But whenever I remember my father, I remember that brown turban.
What may have begun simply as his experiments with a few colors gradually became part of his personality, his unmistakable signature brown turban.
