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 Bihar31 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 ent
husiastic 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.
Even for a director of a nation’s most important herbarium, Dr. Sanjappa seemed to have an extraordinary knowledge of this specialist subject. Indigo had been the subject of his doctoral thesis, he explained, and even though his work now involved many other things, he was still fascinated by this species. “Actually, of sixty-two varieties of indigo in India, I have collected fifty-eight,” he said. Of these he had actually discovered six, naming most after the environment they grew in, although one—Indigofera sesquipedalis— was named half jokingly because its leaves were half a foot in length, and Dr. Sanjappa loved the Latin word for this. On one Himalayan indigo expedition, he told me, he and three others camped at 17,000 feet and walked up through the thin air at 20,000 feet every day for forty days, such was their keenness to complete their collection.
I had my own less energetic indigo expedition to undertake. Could Dr. Sanjappa tell me where in the gardens I could find some indigo? “There is none,” he said. “It is rather sad.” And we both reflected on how sad it was, and how extraordinary it was that—once again—cultivated indigo should so completely have disappeared from the land where it was born. And then Dr. Sanjappa remembered something. “Perhaps there is one: I saw it a few months back, growing wild. Perhaps it is still there—unless the gardener has cleared it.” I asked him to mark it on the map he had given me—it was about two kilometers away—and then I opened the old book of paintings again to remind myself of the pattern of tinctoria ’s leaves and flowers, to make sure I recognized it. Dr. Sanjappa made up his mind. “You will never find it on your own,” he said. “I will call for a jeep.” As we walked outside together I realized he was limping. What happened to your leg? I asked. “Oh, it was just a polio infection when I was six months old,” he said. I then realized the enormity of the expeditions he had told me about. A Himalayan climb of 3,000 feet every morning armed with collecting equipment is a tough feat for anyone. For Dr. Sanjappa, his search for indigo was nothing less than heroic.
Our expedition included two drivers and three guards armed with lathis—the traditional Indian police sticks—who had leapt in the back of the car. “I do hope the indigo is still there,” Dr. Sanjappa said as we pulled up in an unpromising part of the forest. “Yes, yes,” he exclaimed in excitement before we had even climbed out of the vehicle. And there it was, my Indigofera tinctoria, the possible seed descendant—I like to think—of the plants that Roxburgh had kept so long ago. And Dr. Sanjappa was right: I could never have found it on my own.
I once interviewed the Swiss conductor Charles Dutoit, who, when he was a student in the 1960s, had talked his way into page-turning for a concert conducted by Igor Stravinsky in New York. What was the great composer like? I wondered. “Short,” was Dutoit’s surprise answer. “I had expected a man of his musical stature to reflect that in his physical stature. But he didn’t,” he said, still disappointed so many years later. And this particular indigo plant was the same for me: very short. It was not even 80 centimeters high, and quite lost in the middle of the pulsating life force of the Calcutta Botanical Gardens.32 It had tiny delicate round leaves and even smaller, cheeky pink flowers only a millimeter or two long. But the saddest thing was that it was being choked to death by a strangling weed. When I mentioned it, the three guards turned gardeners. They leapt to the rescue and cleared the little plant of the vines that were slowly killing it.
It wasn’t the grand indigo tree of my childhood dream, but something much more vulnerable. And I like to think of it still growing there, holding out bravely against the weeds, a tiny legacy of Bengal’s history.33
10
Violet
“I will tell you. The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, Burn’d on the water: the poop was beaten gold; Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them.”
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: Antony and Cleopatra, II ii
The story of how modern purple dye was discovered has become a legend in the history of chemistry: a spring evening in London, a teenager packing up after a day spent trying to find a cheap cure for a killer disease, an accidental drip on a laboratory basin, and suddenly the world changed color. What is less well known is how it also set off a chain of events that led to the rediscovery of two long-forgotten ancient dyes: the color of Cleopatra’s sexy sails and that of the Temple of Solomon.
In 1856 William Henry Perkin was eighteen and something of a prodigy at the Royal College of Chemistry. He and his classmates had been looking for a synthetic alternative to quinine, the malaria remedy that until then was only found in the bark of a South American tree. His teacher had noticed that some of the substances left over from gas lighting were very similar to quinine, and he had persuaded his students to try to work out how to add hydrogen and oxygen to coal tar and make their fortunes.
Perkin loved chemistry, and he had set up the top floor of his parents’ house in the East End of London as a laboratory. It was there that, washing his glass flasks one evening, he noticed a black residue. As he explained to a news reporter many years later during a visit to America, he was about to throw it away when he paused, thinking it might be interesting. “The solution of it resulted in a strangely beautiful color,” he told the journalist. “You know the rest.” 1
I used to live just 50 meters away from where Perkin grew up, near Shadwell Basin in Docklands, and I remember one day noticing a blue historical plaque on the side of a housing estate. It told me that this was where the first “aniline dyestuff” was invented in March 1856, in a home laboratory. I went home and looked up aniline in the dictionary—it is, as I would remember much later during my quest for indigo, derived from “nil,” the Sanskrit word for that dye—and I imagined a color as blue as the plaque. It was years later that I learned that Perkin had accidentally made mauve.
He didn’t call it “mauve” at first, though. He initially called his discovery “Tyrian P
urple.” For Perkin this would have been almost a legendary description remembered from his days learning Latin. He would have known it was an ancient dye once worn only by emperors, and he would have chosen the name to suggest a sense of luxury and elitism—no doubt to encourage buyers to part with more money than they wanted to spend. It was only later, realizing perhaps that scholarly historical references were not necessarily the way to attract buyers of high fashion, that he renamed it after a pretty French flower.2
Whatever the final name, Perkin was lucky: he had discovered the color of the moment. That year Queen Victoria had commissioned the French craftsman Edouard Kreisser to make a cabinet for her consort Albert’s birthday. Inspired by a revival of interest in the bright enamels of Sèvres porcelain, it is a cheerful combination of turquoise and pink flowers curling around two blonde ladies in lovely purple dresses.3 By 1858 every lady in London, Paris and New York who could afford it was wearing “mauve,” and Perkin, who had opened a dye factory with his father and brother, was set to be a rich man before he reached his twenty-first birthday. Without his discovery industrial dyers would probably have fulfilled demand by blending indigo with madder, or using lichens. But nothing had quite the totally purple appeal of Perkin’s synthesized dye.