Color: A Natural History of the Palette (31 page)

A few months earlier I had been in touch with Brian Lisus, a violin-maker in South Africa, who had experimented with real Indian Yellow as varnish. He had consulted a vet, who had recommended giving the cows mango leaves for one of two daily meals, which he did for a fortnight, “followed by some interesting times standing behind the cow to catch ‘the treasure’ in a bucket.”
⁵
He then followed instructions from the National Gallery in London about how to boil down the urine for several hours, a process that “kept visitors away,” he said. The color, however, was not at all intense, and he guessed that to get enough color in the urine the cows would have to be fed more mango leaves; he didn’t want to harm their digestive systems, so he gave up on the idea. His story of his very unusual “treasure” hunt had made me refer back to the 1883 letter for a section that I had never seen repeated in any secondary sources, for reasons no doubt of delicacy. It’s all very well if you are doing an experiment with cows for just a fortnight and can wait around with a bucket and a sense of humor, but how did the original
gwalas
do it? Mr. Mukharji was very clear: “The cows treated with mango leaves are made to pass urine three or four times a day by having the urinary organ slightly rubbed with the hand, and they are so habituated to this process that they have become incapable of passing water of their own accord.” It seemed highly suspicious that passing water on demand should be such a similar process to being milked.

I would at least like to see some cows, I decided. Yes, Rajiv said. “And you must see the mango garden.” The mango garden? Of course. There had to be an orchard or two in the area, I suddenly realized. In a survey report from this area dated from 1905 to 1912, a P. W. Murphy reported plenty of excellent opium (slightly storm damaged) and some rather nasty mangoes. “The local mango is not good, and in the Jamui subdivision degenerates into a small hard fruit with an extremely acid taste,” he had written. He had also counted all the adult cows (130,799) and buffaloes (45,164) in the area, and yet had not mentioned Indian Yellow. What he had noticed was “that the cows, bullocks and buffaloes of this district are much smaller and less well-nourished than in other districts”— but he included all of them in that appraisal, and he made no mention of a small minority whose digestive tracts were being ruined by the wrong diet.

“Yes, we have a very beautiful mango garden,” Rajiv affirmed. It was beyond the power of his chair to accompany us, but led by a ragtag crew of little boys and girls all chanting “Mango garden, mango garden,” I crossed that road I had found so unpromising an hour before. And laughing at myself for feeling rather like an explorer, I suddenly found myself at the possible source of Winsor & Newton Indian Yellow. The end of my search, I thought dramatically and happily as I clambered with the children over a bit of broken wall. And as dusty and hot as it was outside, in the mango garden of Mirzapur it was green and quiet, and however far we walked we never saw the wall that marked its boundary on the other side. The children and I marched and chanted and whenever I decided to take a picture of the famous mango leaves they would rush to the tree of my choice and shimmy up it, perching like mynahs in the branches. There were several young couples walking there as well. The god Shiva married Parvati under a mango tree, and the leaves are often used to decorate marriage pavilions, even today.

One child was dispatched to find fruit for me. Not mangoes—it wasn’t the season—but strange things called paniala that were slightly different from grapes, and eaten whole. They would have been nicely sweet but had the strange lemon-like aftereffect of squeezing the mouth dry. Whenever anyone new arrived I was asked to do the mime again, with everyone joining in the “ssss.” I pictured a stranger arriving in that same village in ten years’ time, and asking about
piuri
; and I imagined someone carefully explaining the cow and the mango leaves and the pissing in the bucket. And the stranger would write down the date that I had selected at random, 1900, and the folk memory would again be created.

I gathered the whole crowd for a photograph: five extra children ran into the group so I stepped back to include them and, suddenly, there was a loud splat. I looked down, and there covering my left foot from heel to lace was the gungiest, yellowest and smelliest example of bovine diarrhea I could imagine. Everyone held their noses in horror, and laughed with me, although none of them could have understood the true beauty of the joke. I had, after all, gone to India to find bright yellow cow pee and had found something rather strikingly similar, all over my shoe. The gods had evidently heard about my search, but they were a little deaf.

They took me on a tour of the cows and the houses—but at each place, when we asked, nobody had heard of the
piuri
. I offered one cow a mango leaf, but it turned away. The cowherd offered it again, and it looked distressed. He tried to force-feed it by opening its mouth, but I asked him to stop. And I felt glad that, in Mirzapur south of Monghyr, if Indian Yellow was ever made, it no longer is today.

As I returned to Monghyr, I thought of the ingredients of my story, and of Mr. Mukharji going back the same way. What kind of world did he live in? In the 1880s there was a rising national consciousness all over Asia—and in British-occupied Bengal it manifested itself in a desire to reassert and in a way reconstruct ancient Indian traditions. It was around 1883 that the world “desh” started being used to describe the whole of India or Bengal (part of which would later become “Bangladesh” with Independence), when originally it simply meant one’s ancestral village. At the same time the early poems of the nationalist Rabindranath Tagore were just beginning to have an impact on Bengali thinking. The half-forgotten Vedas were being retranslated from Sanskrit, yoga was coming back into fashion, and Hinduism was suddenly a philosophy, not just a pantheistic religion. There was even the genesis of a movement to preserve the sacred cow—because in so many places the sacredness of cows had been forgotten. Cows were an important issue for many reasons, but a sense of national identity was one of them.

Perhaps Mr. Mukharji really was just an honest emissary, out to solve a simple mystery in the history of paint. But what if he was a nationalist, wanting to make a point, or at least a joke, at the expense of the British? Would it not have been tempting (when presented with the opportunity) to mix up the germs of truth—of a paint that was indeed made with some kind of urine
⁶
and some kind of mangoes—with some random elements of Hindu mythology, and tell the British that their paint was not only totally impure but, since it involved cows, a violation against Hinduism?

Perhaps Mirzapur really was the only place in India where a particular paint was made, and perhaps the banning of that paint was really of so little interest to anyone that nobody bothered to record it, and perhaps the grandchildren of the people who supplied the world with this paint really have forgotten all about it. Maybe all those things are true. But when I think of Indian Yellow I will always wonder whether the explanation that I have heard is reality or merely a reflection of reality, and whether this story is simply an example of somebody gently, and literally, taking the piss.

GAMBOGE AND ORPIMENT

Man Luen Choon
⁷
is on the second floor of an old building in the back streets of Hong Kong’s Western District. It is hard to see the door for all the stalls selling fake bags, buttons and boas made of dyed chicken feathers. Just two blocks away from this old alleyway is the glass skyscraper that calls itself The Centre, but which locals tend to call the “Building of Color,” because every night it lights the skyline with a computerized sequence of ever-shifting turquoises, pinks and greens. It is an example of the gracefully modern juxtaposed with the determinedly traditional. While The Centre blazes with millions of dollars of color technology, Man Luen Choon is Hong Kong’s most famous Chinese art supplier. The first time I went there I wanted it to be dark and old fashioned, but instead it is bright and neon—a bit too much like The Centre for my liking. However, the lighting was probably a good thing. It meant I would see with neon clarity the miraculous transformation of one particular paint from something brown to something beautiful.

I was there with two friends—Fong So, who is an artist, and his partner Yeung Wai-man, a writer and photographer. They had offered to introduce me to the owner, Li Chingwan, who comes from a family that ran a famous art shop in Guangzhou for many generations, and who has been in Hong Kong for twenty years. There were few mass-produced paint tubes in the shop—Mr. Li’s pigments were proudly displayed on small white dishes under a glass cabinet. For a dedicated paint searcher it was a kind of heaven. Here was a pinch of cinnabar, there were lumps of azurite and malachite, and over there were even little clay-like squares of orpiment.

Orpiment means “gold pigment.” For a long time it was an immensely exciting commodity for alchemists. If it was gold in color, went the argument, then it must surely share characteristics with gold, and could be used for transformations. Artists were less thrilled about it—partly because if anything is laid on top it blackens,
⁸
but mostly because it contains arsenic. It is “really poisonous,” warned Cennini—and on the general toxicity scale it is beaten only by its more orange cousin realgar, which is even worse.
⁹
“We do not use [realgar], except sometimes on panel,” Cennino warned. “There is no keeping company with it.” And then he relented: “It wants to be ground a great deal with clear water. And look out for yourself.”
¹⁰

I shouldn’t have been so surprised to find both orpiment and realgar so easily in a Chinese art shop. The Chinese have always had a less cautious attitude than Europeans toward these two paints. In 1705 an extraordinary book called
The Ambonese Curiosity Cabi
net was published posthumously in Holland.
¹¹
It was written by a German called George Everhard Rumphius, who had spent most of his life working for the Dutch East Indies Company—and it led to him being dubbed the “Indian Pliny.” Which was partly a positive reference to his infectious enthusiasm for knowledge, but also partly because of his notable reluctance to distinguish between myth and fact.

One can find on Java a kind of orpiment, he wrote. “Its taste is not astringent but almost tasteless, or perhaps veering a little to vitriolum,” he continued, bravely. He had found it for sale in Javanese trade towns, as well as on Bali and in China. Apart from painting on paper, it was also used to color a special gold, red and white linen, called krinsing. After smearing orpiment on the cloth, the krinsing-makers used to hang it up for days in a smoky room, to make the color fix. The Chinese and Javanese didn’t see it as a poison, in fact quite the opposite: they would take it fearlessly as medicine, “but in small quantities, wherein they are not careful enough in my opinion.” Once, in 1660 in Batavia—now Jakarta— he had seen a woman who had become mad from it, “and climbed up the walls like a cat.”

Rumphius was not against orpiment in moderation. He recommended taking it in small doses to cure anemia, and for its tonic effect on the nervous system. People in the Tirol, he reported, ate arsenic regularly to improve their strength and complexion—a practice that was to continue until the end of the nineteenth century, and which led to the word “arsenicophagy.” More intriguing, though, for our myth collector, was realgar or
hinghong
. It was easy to find: just look for a place “where the peacock has made its nest three years in a row.” The peacocks, he explained, probably meaning the peahens, put it next to their eggs to keep snakes away. It could be useful, I decided, thinking of the pythons on the Peak, and I bought a few grams’ worth in a small cardboard box printed with red Chinese characters. Mr. Li had samples of nearly all the natural pigments mentioned in this book. All the paint materials were from China except for two, he said: Japanese soot-based ink (“the most expensive in the world”) and gamboge yellow. And it was gamboge that I had come to see.

This paint has been used in Chinese and Japanese paintings since at least the eighth century, and it has also been found on early Indian miniatures—in fact it was probably sometimes used to paint Krishna’s yellow clothes, as a less smelly alternative to cow-urine yellow. It was always imported: gamboge comes mostly from Cambodia—its name is even a corruption of the name for that country.
¹²
It appears in other Southeast Asian countries as well, and there was certainly enough gamboge on the Thai border in the 1880s for King Chulalongkorn to send some good samples of the resin to the United States as part of a “gift of respect.”

During the horrific Khmer Rouge regime in the 1980s, and then earlier in the Vietnam War, the color was almost impossible to find. “In wartime it gets mixed with mud,” Mr. Li explained. “Once I imported fifty kilos of dirty gamboge, because even that was rare.” He showed me a clean piece—a “peacetime piece,” he called it. It was the shape of a lump of Brighton rock, although it was slightly squashed as if it had been in a child’s pocket for too long. It had the smooth brittleness of hard toffee, and was the color of dry ear wax. But when Mr. Li dipped a paintbrush in water and waved it lightly over the unappetizingly brownish rock, he released a miraculous drop of the brightest yellow imaginable, almost fluorescent.

The Chinese call it “ivy yellow” or “rattan yellow,” but gamboge comes from neither ivy nor rattan, but from the
Garcinia hanburyi
—a tall tree related to the mangosteen, but without such a delicious fruit. The paint in Mr. Li’s hand was the resin of the garcinia, and had been tapped using a similar method to rubber extraction—except for one critical difference. A semicircular slash in a rubber tree’s trunk bleeds white latex within a few hours which can be collected the next morning. By contrast, a gamboge collector makes his or her cut deeply in the trunk, carefully places a hollowed-out bamboo beneath the gash . . . and doesn’t come back until the following year.