Color

by Victoria Finlay

  It is the secret of knowing yourself and your materials so well that you can wrap your life’s experiences into the very body of an instrument, just as a true musician puts his or her life experiences into the playing of it, as I had seen at the hospice. And when both elements are right, then together—maker and musician—you can persuade your violin to sing and cry and dance the orange.

  6

  Yellow

  “There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.”

  PABLO PICASSO

  “What is purple in the earth, red in the market and yellow on the table?”

  Iranian riddle (answer below)

  On the shelf above my desk there is a box containing five things. They make an odd collection, and if anyone came across them by accident I’m sure they wouldn’t think of them as particularly precious. But they have come a long way, and they all have stories to tell.

  The first is my favorite—a bunch of mango leaves, which have turned moldy after only two months in the Hong Kong humidity. Then there is a small cylinder of what looks like dirty plastic; it’s the color of dark amber, but when I touch it with even the tiniest amount of water it beads into an incredibly bright, fluorescent droplet of yellow. Once I thought it was a little miracle, and showed the trick to everyone I met, sometimes using spit if I didn’t have water. But now that I have found out more about it, I have to be careful of it. Then there is a little cardboard container the size of a matchbox: outside it is covered in Chinese writing and inside there are little yellow slabs. But I don’t take them out much: I have to be careful of them too. And finally there are two small glass vials containing the world’s most expensive spice. One of them is redder than the other, and the reason for that is part of my story too.

  It isn’t surprising, given the chapter heading, that all my little souvenirs can be used to make yellow paints and dyes. But what has surprised me, in the collecting of them, is how, with such a bright, happy color, it has been so necessary to use caution. No color has a neat unambiguous symbolism, but yellow gives some of the most mixed messages of all. It is the color of pulsating life—of corn and gold and angelic haloes—and it is also at the same time a color of bile, and in its sulphurous incarnation it is the color of the Devil. In animal life, yellow—especially mixed with black—is a warning. Don’t come near, it commands, or you will be stung or poisoned or generally inconvenienced. In Asia yellow is the color of power— the emperors of China were the only ones allowed to sport sunshine-colored robes. But it is also the color of declining power. A sallow complexion comes with sickness; the yellow of leaves in autumn not only symbolizes their death, it indicates it. The change shows that the leaves are not absorbing the same light energy that they used to take in when they were green and full of chlorophyll. It shows they no longer have what it takes to nourish them.

  INDIAN YELLOW

  In Mumbai’s Prince of Wales museum there is an eighteenth-century watercolor of two lovers, sitting beneath a tree. One is Krishna, the playboy incarnation of Vishnu, the cloth of his yellow dhoti contrasting beautifully with his blue skin. He is playing the flute to his girlfriend Radha, who is looking at him with admiration. They are sitting under what is perhaps a mango tree, which is a symbol of love in Hindu mythology. What we cannot see here—although we can see it in other watercolors nearby—is that on the other side of the garden there are cows eating grass and leaves, herded by pretty milkmaids. Krishna will later pursue them, which will wreak havoc in his relationship with his girlfriend. But this is in the future, and for the moment all is perfect. The miniatures illustrate a popular Hindu story of the playfulness of the gods, of tragedy and misunderstanding, and of course of the wonderful intoxication of romance. And they are also, with their cows, trees and yellow color, the summary of the story of one particular paint—the color, quite possibly, that adorns Krishna’s clothes.

  For years in both England and in parts of India the ingredients of Indian Yellow were a mystery. Throughout the nineteenth century little parcels arrived irregularly at the London docks from Calcutta, sealed no doubt with plenty of string and sealing wax, and addressed to colormen like George Field and Messrs Winsor & Newton. Those who sniffed the stale contents must have wondered where they came from and what they were made of, but if the companies made active enquiries about what they were buying, then the answers have been long since lost. Some suggested it was snake urine, others thought it might be something that had been dug out of the insides of animals (like the ox bile that had been used to make yellow in the previous century) and a German scientist called W. Schmidt stated authoritatively in 1855 that it had been excreted from camels that had eaten mango fruits. George Field didn’t like it much—not because of the strange smell but because it faded quickly—and his theory, agreeing roughly with Professor Schmidt’s, was that the “powdery, soft, light, spongy” lumps with their fetid odor, were derived from the urine of camels.1

  Then, one day in 1883, a letter arrived at the Society of Arts in London, from a Mr. T. N. Mukharji of Calcutta. This gentleman had investigated Indian Yellow on the request of the eccentric but brilliant director of Kew Gardens, Sir Joseph Hooker, and said he could now confirm exactly what Indian Yellow was made from. Mr. Mukharji said he had recently visited the only place in India where it came from—a town called Monghyr in Bihar state—and had actually seen it being made. The information that he gave them may have been a little shocking to some of his journal readers, but what he told them was that Indian Yellow, which was also known as piuri, was made from the urine of cows fed with mango leaves. He could assure readers that he had actually seen them eating mango leaves, and urinating—on demand—into buckets. And, he warned, the cows looked unhealthy and were said to die very early.

  But here is another mystery about Indian Yellow. According to some accounts that letter, or at least the industry it described, started off protests, which culminated in laws—passed sometime between the 1890s and 1908 in Bengal—forbidding the making of Indian Yellow on the grounds of cruelty to animals. But I could find no records of such laws in either the India Library in London or the National Library in Calcutta, nor did either of those excellent archives contain any newspaper articles or correspondence on this intriguing slice of Indian art history. The four researchers for the Indian Yellow chapter in the National Gallery of Washington’s excellent series on artists’ pigments couldn’t find any either.2 In fact, the only piece of nineteenth-century documentation that anyone seems to have located in English was Mr. Mukharji’s printed letter in the Journal of the Society of Arts. It seemed odd that nobody else had written anything—not even, it seems, a letter to a newspaper— about the mango cows of Monghyr. So, with photocopy firmly in hand, I decided to go to India on the trail of Indian Yellow.

  Bihar is a large, mostly flat state between the Himalayas and Calcutta. It is the poorest state in India. I flew into the capital, Patna, which one guidebook described as a city you wouldn’t want to spend much time in, in a state you wouldn’t want to spend much time in either. That first night in Bihar, the night clerks at the one-star hotel I was staying in phoned me three times. “It’s the middle of the night,” I groaned. “Yes, madam, but it is Saturday night, and Patna is alive with disco.” Mine was the first foreign name in their visitors’ book for a month, and the first single female name since the book started.

  Monghyr is 150 kilometers from Patna, and the train journey takes four hours, through flat countryside showing the healthy green of well-nourished farmlands. This land I was passing through was important to art history not simply because it was the home of the yellow paint that had so caught my imagination but because, according to Tibetan tradition, this is the mythological birthplace of painting itself.

  There were, so the story goes, two kings who lived in the sixth century B.C. Every year they would exchange gifts—outdoing each other, as rich people often t
ry to do, with the cleverness and expense of their choices. One year one of the kings decided to give his rival the ultimate present—a painting of the Buddha, who was at that time still alive and living in Bihar. No painting had ever been done before, but, undeterred, the king assigned the job to a man who seemed to have potential. But when he arrived at the place where the Buddha was in meditation, our first artist realized he had a problem: he was so overwhelmed by his subject’s enlightened glow that he could not look at him. But then the Buddha made a suggestion. “We will go down to the bank of a clear and limpid pool,” he said helpfully. “And you will look at me in the reflection of the water.” They found an appropriately limpid pond, and the man happily painted the reflection.

  When the king received the gift and looked at the portrait, he had an intuitive understanding of reality.3 In terms of Buddhist teachings he realized that the world we see with our eyes is just a reflection of a reality that we cannot quite grasp. But the story also gives an insight into the power of painting, suggesting that this thing that is a reflection of truth can also somehow be truth, and that the best art can give its viewers enlightened understandings of the world.

  As my train slowly rattled through the countryside, it was as if the land itself conspired to celebrate the myth that it was here that painting had begun: the whole landscape was covered with paint. It was harvest-time in Bihar, and the Hindu farmers celebrated the safe gathering of the crops by covering their animals in pigments. I saw a great cart moving toward the railway line. It was pulled by two white bullocks, both daubed in pink as if a child had been finger-painting over them. The paints I saw were synthetic, but there must have been similar scenes every harvest-time for hundreds of years. Perhaps it is what the Buddha saw, as he walked toward enlightenment; it is almost certainly what the Mughal rulers must have seen as they tried to conquer the predominantly Hindu sub-continent in the sixteenth century. And I am sure the British colonizers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw painted animals every September, celebrating the harvest.

  I was not sure what to expect of Monghyr. My information was very out of date. In 1845 a Captain Sherwill, who had the job of revenue surveyor, described Monghyr as a town with “a probable population of 40,000 souls.” 4 It was, he wrote, “a well-built, substantial and flourishing place, with about 300 brick houses and numerous markets carrying on a brisk trade in brassware, cutlery of an inferior kind, guns, rifles, pistols and ironware in general, but of a very doubtful and dangerous nature as far as regards firearms.” I was intrigued by how, although Monghyr was clearly a welcoming place, the rest of the district was somehow shadowed by a kind of physical corruption that this British officer found threatening. The nearby town of Shaikpoora, he wrote with a horror that comes through even in his formal report to his bosses, was “remarkable for the great number of individuals who possess but one eye and have deformed noses, the effects of syphilis.” That town was “composed of one long narrow street of disgustingly dirty and ruinous houses, with a filthy population and very little trade; grain and sugar are exported toward the Ganges, and an opium godown is situated to the east of the town.”

  There is a map that accompanies the statistics in Sherwill’s report. Monghyr and the nasty Shaikpoora are in pink, but the region of Bullah across the other side of the holy Ganges river is in a yellow that still shines. I like to think it was painted with Indian Yellow watercolor, even though when I sniffed it—making sure that my fellow library-users did not see what I was doing—I detected no faint 150-year-old scent of ammonia. Whether it was used on that map or not, Indian Yellow would almost certainly have been in the paintboxes of many of the surveyors and map-makers sent to the colonies in the Victorian years. Captain Sherwill’s report was extremely detailed about all the industries in the area—he even described a mysterious and obscure mineral found on a small hill, west of the station of Gya, “used for dyeing clothes, of an orange color, also for metalling the roads in the station. This mineral is either of an orange, purple, light-red or yellow color.” So it is extraordinary that he didn’t even mention Monghyr piuri.

  Monghyr is a place that is entirely off the Planet—or any other guidebook—and I didn’t have any clues about where to stay. I told the taxi driver I wanted to go to a hotel, but he took me instead to an ashram, insisting this was where I wanted to go. Acolytes dressed variously in orange, yellow and white strolled quietly along empty avenues. It was a complete contrast to the noisy mayhem a few kilometers away in the town, but I could see that it wasn’t the place for me. White was for the uninitiated, I read in the brochure, aspirants wore yellow, and the teachers wore “geru.” “Can I ask a funny question?” I asked a slim young man with white stripes on his forehead, who was manning the office. “You can ask a funny question and I will give a fine answer,” he said. What is geru? “It is orange,” he said, indicating his own clothes which put him firmly in the highest category of Bihar yogis. “It represents the luminosity within.” And what does yellow represent? “Yellow is the light in nature. It invites the soul, as black protects the soul.” I nodded, and thanked him, but he had one thing more to tell me. “You see the thing about yellow is that it has to be purified.”

  A friendly Bihar bank manager, fresh from a class, gave me and my bags a lift into town on the back of his scooter. “You have to go to see Monghyr’s oldest artist,” he said as I explained my quest above the sounds of the motor. “If anyone knows of this paint then Chaku Pandit at Mangal Bazaar will know.” So the next day I crossed the railway line heading toward Mangal Bazaar. Monghyr is a simple town—it reminded me very much of the India I saw eighteen years earlier on my first visit as a teenager. Everything is rickety, with places that were once probably palaces now hidden behind padlocked railings and being pulled down by vines and mold. The gun shops had gone, but there were plenty of hardware stores selling the kind of “inferior cutlery” that Captain Sherwill had commented on 150 years before. The syphilis problem was evidently still there as well: on every street corner there were hand-painted promises for venereal disease checks as well as operations for piles, conducted “without anesthetic.”

  Everywhere the people seemed astonished to see me: they weren’t used to visitors. “Mangal Bazaar?” I asked, and the world followed me. “You go down the street and turn left,” an old man said, indicating right with his hand. You mean go right? I queried. “Yes,” he said, “left.” In the end neither was the correct way, but I did eventually find Chaku Pandit, a man with nearly blind blue eyes, in a blue house with round columns. We had a spontaneous conference organized by his son, with three of us on wooden chairs. One man went to get me a cold drink; another was summoned to sit on the floor and wave a punkah fan in my direction as the sweat ran down my nose onto my notes. “There are many kinds of piuri,” his friend said carefully. Which one was I interested in? I felt highly optimistic that I was on track to discover something. Mr. Mukharji, after all, had stated in his letter that there were two kinds of piuri—a mineral one “imported from London” and an animal one, which is what I was looking for. “Any kind,” I said airily, and a boy was sent off with careful instructions in Hindi. I tried to explain it was Krishna’s yellow, the one he always wears in watercolors, or at least the one he wears when he’s not wearing orange. They explained to me sadly that Krishna was blue; and it was in vain to protest that I knew this.

  Chaku Pandit brought in a very brown Monarch-of-the-Glen-like portrait of a stag, the canvas bloated and bumpy where the damp had settled. His other paintings were rather gaudy pictures of idealized landscapes. The boy came back with a paintbox of oil tubes, manufactured in Bombay. “I have not heard of your Indian Yellow before. But why would we use cow urine when we have these good paints?” mused Chaku Pandit. I had to concede he was right, and thanking him for his time, his son for the cola and the man crouched on the floor for the fan, I went outside and hailed a cycle rickshaw. It had the motto “enjoyment of lovers” written on its seat. “Mirzapur, please,” I s
aid. And we began to head out into the countryside.

  I thought of Mr. Mukharji heading out on the same road 120 years before. What would he have been looking for? I wondered. Was he simply looking for a paint made by cowherds, or could there have been another reason for his interest? My predecessor had probably known that piuri had most likely been invented by the Persians in the late sixteenth century, and had mostly been used for miniatures—first by Mughal artists, later being adopted by the Hindus and the Jain painters. It was strange that the Jains—who are vegetarians and very strongly against inflicting pain on animals— should have painted with this apparently cruel color. “This is Mirzapur,” announced my driver, and stopped. It seemed we were not stopping anywhere in particular: it was a bit of road like every other bit of road. I was briefly encouraged to see a bovine creature peeing in a nearby meadow, but then realized it was a buffalo.

  There was a little tea stall nearby, so I decided to do what I usually do when I’m hoping for an adventure. Sit, have a drink—tea in this case—and wait for it to come to me. I went over and the man made space for me to perch on the edge of a well. I hoped the tea water came from somewhere else, as the well water was covered in scum. Usually in this kind of situation someone will ask in English “What are you doing?,” leading me to my quest. But this time nobody did. Nobody could speak English. I cursed the fact that the young man I thought I had hired as my translator the night before had not turned up in the morning.