Color: A Natural History of the Palette (49 page)

About a hundred bundles were placed in each vat—which measured about seven meters square and a meter deep—and clean river water was pumped in. “The liquid, of a dull or sometimes bright orange colour, but at first of horrid odour, is allowed to run out,” Grant wrote to his sisters with an artist’s eye for color. “As it spreads on the floor, the orange colour is exchanged for a bright raw green, covered with a beautiful lemon-coloured cream or froth.”
²⁵
The leaves and branches were then removed (and dried as manure or fuel), at which point the real action started, with ten men jumping into the vat, up to their hips, armed with large flat bamboo oars.

Colesworthey Grant’s engraving of workers beating the indigo

It sounds like a vile job—but rather to his surprise, Grant concluded that the workers seemed to be enjoying themselves. They had been brought in from the tribal areas 200 kilometers away, and their task involved leaping energetically around the vats and beating the liquid with their oars “until the whole contents [were] in a whirl” and the surface became covered with heaps of blue foamy soapsuds. For Grant it had the atmosphere of a party, full of songs and joking and a group dancing action that reminded him of the quadrilles he and his sisters had learned in Surrey. What was more, when they emerged after some two hours of indigo aerobics, the men were as deep dyed as Caractacus’s woad warriors—and far from minding they celebrated their wild appearance with plenty of laughter. They were not so much “blue devils,” Grant concluded, as “merry devils.”
²⁶

By contrast, however, there were other people who were not merry at all when it came to dealing with indigo—and those people were the farmers. It was not just the fact that they had to pay bribes to the measurers and other plantation workers that the farmers objected to. It was that they had to grow indigo at all. The problem lay in the system. English settlers were not allowed to own more than a few acres
²⁷
(the loss of America, when settlers demanded their own government for their own land, was too recent and too raw), so they had to persuade Bengali farmers to do the work for them. But the farmers often wanted to grow rice on their land, not indigo, so the English settlers (who were called “planters” even though they were by law not allowed to do much planting) tended to resort to tactics that usually worked: beating and bullying.

Colesworthey Grant’s host—who had started a school and a hospital and was generally well respected in the community—was one of just two liberal planters in Bengal in the 1850s. The others were harsher men—often from the lower classes and therefore scorned by the better-educated administrators—who thought nothing of throwing farmers in prison or sentencing them to be whipped for not repaying money they had been forced to borrow.
²⁸
One of the most notorious planters was a man called George Meares, who regularly burned down the homes of farmers who would not grow indigo for him, and who in 1860 managed to get an order passed forbidding rice to be grown on lands that had ever grown indigo. A series of events that have been dubbed the “Blue Mutiny,” and which would eventually lead to the curbing of this iniquitous system, started a few weeks later.
²⁹

It started in the village of Barasat—one of the plantations closest to Calcutta. The farmers began a noisy protest, and all around Bengal men followed their lead—and were thrown into prison hundreds at a time until the cells overflowed. There were rumors of a plot to kidnap the Viceroy, Lord Ripon—upon which the newspaper
The Englishman
declared that “we are on the eve of a crisis.”
³⁰

Much later, the missionary James Long would recall sitting down with his Sanskrit teacher one April morning in 1860 and looking up to find fifty men crowding round his window, waving a petition. Soon after, Long (who had been supportive of the indigo farmers’ cause) was asked to translate a play by a postal worker called Dinabandhu Mitra. The chief villains in
Nil Darpan—The Indigo Mirror
—are shambling, violent versions of George Meare, cruel colonials who indulge in rape, beating, corruption and the encouragement of prostitution. They speak in half-sentences peppered with explicit swear words—while the farmers are invariably fluent and articulate in their protests at what is happening to them under the brutal British system. “Owing to the beating this man has got, I think he will be confined in bed for a month,” a Bengali chides one of the Englishmen called Wood, after he has nearly killed one of the farmers. “Sir, you have also your family. Now, what sorrow would affect the mind of your wife if you were taken prisoner at your dinner-time?” Wood replies by calling the man what is variously translated as a “cow-eater” or “sister-fucker.” It is, it seems, too late for any compromises.

Nil Darpan
was not a subtle drama but it was an effective one. The play swept through Bengal, spawning political activism, and— in Long’s translation and in conjunction with what happened in Barasat—it would spread awareness about the indigo issues to the highest echelons of the British political system. It would also lead the missionary to be sent to prison, for allegedly translating libellous material. It would not be quite the end of indigo’s injustices—Mahatma Gandhi’s first act of peaceful civil disobedience was in northern Bihar
³¹
in 1917 when he went to support indigo peasants who felt mistreated—but it was the beginning of the end.

I had no idea what I was looking for in Barasat—just a half-hour suburban train ride from Calcutta. I just wanted something—anything—that could give me a clue to the history of the place, to somehow sense the atmosphere that spawned the indigo riots of 1860. But the trouble was, all the buildings were twentieth century; most were built in the 1960s and 1970s. And the fields had long since returned to rice cultivation. “I’m looking for an old building,” I said, feeling faintly ridiculous, to gentlemen drinking tea beneath roaring fans at the government offices. They were friendly and assigned my case to a young man called Sunil, who first took me to the information office, then to the courthouse— where the personal assistant to the Chief Magistrate (who was teaching his teenage children how to use a computer) told me that I was in luck. There was just one old house left in Barasat. I found myself following Sunil down little streets lined with rubbish and shoe shops until we turned a corner. And there, huddled against a 1960s apartment block, was a most extraordinary sight—a ghostly ruin of something that once had been a grand house, with a great balcony on the second floor, and huge colonnades stretching to the sky. And beneath the ivy, in the afternoon sunshine, the columns were a glorious shade of blue.

It had been built for Warren Hastings, the first Governor General of India, and had later been used throughout the nineteenth century as the home of British administrators. Accompanied by a gathering crowd, I stepped over the cracked and stained marble of the front steps, and pushed the door. It opened, and we all crunched over rubble into the semi-darkness. Everything was broken and trashed; weeds had taken over the grand staircase, which had scarcely a stair intact. One room smelled like homemade wine. Alcohol? I asked. “No—sewage,” a man said. But it turned out that I had misheard and it was sweets, made from sugarcane, with the debris left to ferment in a corner. A more pleasant smell than indigo’s fermentation.

Standing there, I could imagine a party in the 1850s—carriages arriving, a string quartet, people laughing with drinks in their hands, hanging over the balcony to see who was coming. There would be the District Magistrate, of course, and the army officers from the barracks of Barrackpore. Then there would be the cotton kings and jute kings, and men of the East India Company with their wives and daughters swishing up the stairs in fine silks. And then I imagined a collective intake of breath at a new arrival: one of the indigo planters—“not quite our type,” the snobby colonial ladies might have whispered behind their fans. But then the party would continue despite the swaggering presence of whichever bullying planter had arrived. Times have changed, the wives of the military officers would say with a sigh as they resumed their dancing, just before their safe Victorian world really turned upside down.

For in that decade everything began to change: on a fateful day in 1857 at the arsenal of Dum-Dum—which I had passed on the train—an Untouchable would ask a Brahmin for a cup of water and the seeds would be sown for the Indian Mutiny, and ultimately for the fall of the British Empire, with the indigo riots playing their part in its decline. And for indigo the tide was turning too. In a literal way—the course of the river system was shifting to change the pattern of agriculture in the area—but also in a metaphorical way. In 1856, as I would find in my search for violet, a man would find a way of making synthetic dyes out of tar, and the days of natural indigo would be almost over.

THE LAST INDIGO PLANT

The Calcutta Botanical Gardens are off the tourist track, in the southern part of the city on the Howrah side of the river. A red brick wall surrounds their 100 hectares, and the gate is so unpretentious that my taxi driver missed it the first time. As recently as the early 1990s someone had built turnstiles and ticket offices as well as little glassed-in buildings to the side which were perhaps meant to be a visitors’ center but now—appropriately for a botanical garden—were overgrown with weeds. There were no maps, no sense of being somewhere or going somewhere, just security guards smiling and waving me on, and paths lined with mahogany trees leading into wilderness. There were gardeners, I found out later, but I got no sense of much recent tending. Just of nature grown very wild and very tall, rather as I had seen at Warren Hastings’s ruin. “Where are the offices?” I asked. And a thin man led me several kilometers in the heat, past overgrown and locked palm houses and a lake covered with giant Victoria lilies floating like green cake tins on its surface.

We finally arrived at a dilapidated 1960s building. “I would like to ask about indigo,” I said optimistically to the men at the door. I had no appointment and wondered whether they would wave me away. But instead they asked me to sign their registration book. When I paused at the column where I had to write whom I was meeting they said, “Dr. Sanjappa,” so I wrote it down. I waited in a room full of specimen lockers that smelled of mothballs and then was led into an air-conditioned office with the words “Deputy Director” outside.

Dr. Munirenkatappa Sanjappa was sitting at his desk, dressed in a purple batik shirt covered with a design of silver leaves. On his wall was a tattered engraving of William Roxburgh, the superintendent of the gardens from 1793 to 1813. I had read Roxburgh’s enthusiastic letters about experiments with both indigo and cochineal, and was pleased to see what he looked like—a small man with a keen face and bright eyes who, although dressed in the stuffy cravat and jacket of Georgian England, looked as if he’d be happier in a gardening shirt. Roxburgh was something of a hero in the Botanical Gardens, Dr. Sanjappa said; he had done many good things for Indian botanical history, and one of them was commissioning three thousand paintings of indigenous plants, in the 1780s.

It would be amazing if they still had any of the paintings, I mused. “Oh yes, we have all of them—thirty-five volumes,” he said, and sent a colleague off to the archives. The man came back with volume eight—the indigo-bearing chapter. As I opened it, the leather cover fell off in my hand, and I found myself looking at 220-year-old paintings of twenty-three varieties of
Indigofera
. Although I had seen pictures of indigo in books, it was only then that I appreciated just how varied this species could be. There was my old friend
Indigofera tinctoria
, which had been the main commercial plant in both the East and the West Indies, and which I had still not seen in the flesh, so to speak, and beside it was the well-named
Indigofera flaccida
with its floppy leaves. Another page was dedicated to
Indigofera hirsuta
with its tiny blue beard-growth, and my new favorite,
purpurescens
, with its gloriously generous purple flowers, guarded by battalions of round leaves standing in rows along the stem. The colors had not faded much in two centuries, although sadly the paper had long ago started its journey toward disintegration in the tropical humidity.

“Some people think
tinctoria
is the best one for dye,” Dr. Sanjappa said. “But Roxburgh always said that
coerulia
had more blue. The name means sky, of course.” He told me how
Indigoferas
could grow anywhere from the hottest deserts to the highest mountains, and that there were several hundred species. Most were bushes, he said, but although none rose to the cathedral canopy I had imagined as a child, one variety could grow to three meters or more if it was allowed. One other thing the
Indigoferas
had in common, apart from a vague bluish tinge, was tiny double hairs, which under a magnifying glass looked like flying seagulls.