In one part of the shed there was a battered wooden cupboard, full of intriguing pots and bags and smells. Antonio took out a pestle and showed me how his father rolled dried leaves from the indigo bush over a slab of volcanic stone. It was now stained blue, but it also contained husks of flour. It had been his grandmother’s, the boy explained; she had used it for making tortillas.
“It’s so expensive to use indigo,” said Benito, joining us just then, his fingernails dirty from the fields where he had been tending his dye plants. He explained how ten years earlier he had realized that the only way to embrace the future was to delve into the past. “The foreigners were asking for natural colors, and we had forgotten how to make them.” So he started asking questions. First he asked his hundred-year-old grandfather, “but he didn’t remember much.” Other old people could remember even less, so Benito did the research himself—learning how cochineal could make sixty shades of red, how yellow could be made from turmeric root from Chiapas, and how indigo could, with the right recipe, dye wool all the shades of blue, “from turquoise to sapphire.”
Benito explained how he did it. He took the plant then he dried it, rolled out the leaves on that heirloom tortilla stone, and fermented the powder in nopal juice—the juice of the same cactus leaf on which cochineal beetles live—which was like a natural sugar. “We do that for six months, and when we take it out of the pot it is green like clay,” he said. Like clay it could be molded in their hands, and when they left it in the sun it turned as blue as midnight. Did he use urine? I asked. Benito shook his head. “The old people told me to but no I don’t.” He paused. “It’s so hard to get urine nowadays.” I laughed, but he was being serious.
He was well advised, certainly, not to bother: the stench would frighten the tourists away, and today there are many more pleasant chemicals to use. But not so long ago stale urine, containing ammonia, was a standard addition to an indigo vat, as a reducing agent. It was one of the cheapest ways of casting the spell to transform indigo from a pigment into a dye. And it was perhaps one of the reasons that, where there was a caste system, dyers were usually among the lowest of the ranks.
In the eighteenth century the main source of urine for the whole of the English dyeing industry was in the North.14 History has rather generously rewritten the story of Newcastle upon Tyne, and credits the city for exporting coal and beer. But two hundred years ago its citizens peed for England. It seems extraordinary now to imagine first that London could not provide its own natural resource, and second that Newcastle should have organized an efficient system whereby its people would have been—presumably—paid pennies while spending them, and where pots of urine were transported around the country by ship.
In other parts of the world—including Pompeii in the first century (where archaeologists found a urine pot outside a dyer’s shop for passers-by to make their offerings) and parts of Scotland even as late as the twentieth (Jenny Balfour-Paul tells of how housewives in the islands used to keep a urine pot permanently on their peat fires for dyeing Harris tweed15 with woad)—the local people used to provide what was needed. And indeed, if Benito ever runs out of his commercial reducing agents, he has, if he but knows it, an excellent natural resource in his two younger sons. The best alkaline ingredient for the vat is apparently the urine of a pre-pubescent boy.
I cycled up to the village, and found a bewildering choice of both stories and rugs. Almost every house sign advertised “anil” and each weaver had alarming stories about how their rivals pretended they were using natural dyes when they were not. Overwhelmed, I paused to return my bicycle—and by a curious coincidence I met precisely the person who could answer my questions. John Forcey had been a Methodist missionary in Oaxaca for many years, but more importantly for my own quest he had just written a book16 specifically about the dyes used by a young prize-winning couple living in Teotitlán. He could take me to meet his weaver friends if I liked, he said. I liked.
I was surprised at how young they were. María Luisa Cruz was twenty-seven, Fidel a year younger. While Fidel kept weaving, making a distant clack-clacking in another room, María Luisa took us into the display room, and we sat in the semi-darkness, talking. “It was hard to get started,” she told me. “We were teenagers and we had just got married.” The normal pattern would have been for them to work for their parents until they could support themselves. “But we wanted to be independent.” They had the skills—Fidel had been carding wool since he was five and weaving since he was twelve—and they certainly had the dreams. But they didn’t have the pesos. Synthetic dyes cost money, and they did not see why they should spend it when the hills were full of free colors. So, in their early days of marriage, they would wake up early and wander the hills and eventually—with a smattering of ancient knowledge and a mass of youthful enthusiasm—they found their first weaver’s “paintbox.” They discovered salmon-pink colors in the muzgo de roca rock lichens, deep browns in cooked wild walnuts, and blacks in the branches of mimosa trees. But it was in the pomegranate— its fruit, rind and bark fermented and stewed—that they found the most beautiful set of natural dyes, running from deep olives to burned oranges to gold.17
Then María Luisa’s tone suddenly changed. “It is mysterious working with color,” she said, leaning forward to impart a different kind of story. “If an agitated or angry person sticks their nose into the room where we are dyeing wool, then”—and she paused for effect—“the indigo will not subir.” I turned to John for elucidation, but he had not only stopped interpreting but was suddenly standing on the other side of the showroom, apparently examining the diamond details on a carpet with tremendous interest. He reluctantly interpreted María Luisa’s theory that the presence of angry human energy in a room could change a standard chemical reaction and stop the dye from fixing. “At first I didn’t believe it myself,” she continued, unfazed by John’s reaction. “But then last year some Japanese tourists came into the room where we were dyeing. They were all noisy and with cameras clicking, and afterward nothing we could do would make the dyes fix.” Mischievously I asked John why he was uncomfortable with this: couldn’t this be a reminder that it is a very miraculous universe out there? “Obviously I don’t agree,” John said quietly. “But they are my friends, and I don’t want to upset them.”
As I write this a few months later in the University of Hong Kong library, someone has just sat down at the desk beside me. He has removed his books loudly from a crackly plastic bag while his phone has started to emit metallic Mozart. He is charged with the swirl of the city; his noise and energy are disturbing my concentration. I can understand how the indigo may have felt. In her book Indigo, Jenny Balfour-Paul includes a section on the “sulky vat”— a folk theory that seems to appear wherever indigo is made. In Java the dye was said to get depressed when a husband and wife fought; in Bhutan pregnant women were not allowed near the vat in case the unborn baby stole the blue. But my favorite story was of how women in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco believed the only way to deal with a vat that didn’t work was to start telling outrageous lies. Dyers were known for deliberately spreading “blackness” around the community. Maybe it did improve the blue, but it also gave a wonderful structure for a community to deal with vicious rumors, and to dismiss negative stories as nothing more than a failed indigo vat.
Perhaps it was the rumor of a cantankerous djinn in the pot, or perhaps it was its resemblance to the sky, or perhaps it was the way the color appeared magically, once the textile hit the air, but indigo has often been considered a mystical color. And one of its mysteries today is that it is part of the spectrum—one of the seven official colors, and yet the one that doesn’t quite belong. Should indigo be here at all, having a separate chapter to itself? I’m glad it is, glad I didn’t have to squash its stories apologetically between blue anecdotes in the previous section. But if you look at a rainbow it is hard to find a stripe of midnight in the place where blue fades to violet. Indeed, some people argue that it isn’t there
at all.
ISAAC’S INDIGO
Indigo gatecrashed the rainbow party at the time of the Great Plague in England. It is not a coincidence: many things changed between 1665 and 1666. London alone lost around 100,000 people, all the universities closed down, and a twenty-three-year-old called Isaac Newton was one of thousands of students who were sent home. Instead of studying at Cambridge he stayed in Lincolnshire and spent the time making sense of the world, at a time when it probably made less sense than usual. It wasn’t just the plague that would have been confusing; Newton had been brought up as a Puritan, and yet five years before, in 1660, the coronation of Charles II had marked the beginning of Restoration decadence and Catholic extravagance.
That year, his room was the center of the expansion of human knowledge. From behind the door, which he mostly left closed, Newton began to understand the world in terms of absolute physical rules. He crystallized his understanding of gravity; he began to formulate theories of the planets; and with the help of two prisms he had picked up at a local fair, he discovered that the colors of the rainbow were held within white light. Not only did he start putting forward theories that colors were varying wavelengths of light, he also upped the list of colors in the official rainbow from five to seven, adding orange and indigo and giving Mr. Roy G. Biv his name.18 The reason he probably opted for seven was because it was a nice cosmological number. We remember Newton as a scientist, the man who opened the way to modern thinking. But in fact he was also a sorcerer—an alchemist, a most unusual Christian by today’s reckoning, whose understanding of the world embraced its total mystery as well as its all-encompassing rules. For Newton, six was insignificant. But there were seven planets (Pluto and Uranus had not yet been spotted, although ironically the telescope that Newton helped improve would ultimately ruin the neatness of the sevens); there were also seven days of the week, and seven musical notes, and he was damned if there were not going to be seven colors of the spectrum. Curiously, in China there are believed to be five elements, five tastes, five musical notes and five colors (black, white, red, yellow and blue), so the idea of coinciding numbers is shared between the two cultures, even if the numbers themselves are different.
But why indigo? What was indigo to Newton, apart from the color of the naked bodies taken out of the plague houses? As a dye it was controversial—it would have been talked about a great deal when he was a boy. A couple of generations before, the main blue in Lincolnshire had been woad; then in danced indigo from India like Bacchus from his revels. But it was usually seen as a dye rather than an actual color. If Newton wanted a seventh shade to make up his mystical harmony of colors, he could have picked the turquoise 19 that separates green from blue, or he could have separated pale violet from deep purple as the spectrum disappears into darkness. But he chose indigo, and he chose it to separate blue from violet.
We think today of indigo as being a midnight blue—the color worn by the navy, or perhaps the color of jeans, which were originally (after the Bohemian immigrant Levi Strauss invented them during the California gold rush in around 1850) dyed in France with indigo grown in the West Indies. 20 But as we also know from jeans, which can range from stone-washed pale to nearly black, indigo can give many different results. In the eighteenth century English dyers used to classify many official shades of indigo, which (from light to dark) included: milk blue, pearl blue, pale blue, flat blue, middling blue, sky blue, queen’s blue, watchet blue, garter blue, mazareen blue, deep blue and navy blue—and one word for woad in French is pastel, which suggests paleness.21 Who is to know what shade of indigo Newton had in front of him when he was inspired to give his rainbow color that name? Could he have had a bedspread in pearl blue in his room? A friend’s milk-blue handkerchief on his desk? Perhaps, when he made his decision, Newton was just thinking of one of those.
Sitting in their marbled libraries, nineteenth-century thinkers argued passionately about why the Greeks didn’t seem to have a word for blue—British Prime Minister William Gladstone even suggested they didn’t have a word for it because they were color-blind to it. So it is appropriate that it was an Englishman who gave the modern rainbow not one blue but two.
A REBEL’S COLOR
In May 1860, 116 years after Eliza’s crop started to make an impact on the American economy, a man called Plowden Weston addressed an audience at the Indigo Hall in Georgetown, South Carolina. It was a boring speech which went on for so long that his listeners can hardly have avoided drowsing off—I did the same myself for a moment, poring over the leaflet22 141 years later in the well-heated New York Public Library. The moment of interest (for me) was when Weston spoke of the utter irrelevance of the Winyaw Indigo Society, which he was addressing. “The excellent men who founded it probably thought that the business by which they gained their properties was likely far to exceed in duration the infant society which they put in being,” he said. But of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, of whom many were in his audience: “not one . . . even remembers the cultivation of indigo.”
Mr. Weston’s audience in South Carolina would not have disagreed. Indeed, the observation would probably have earned him a (rare) murmur of appreciative laughter. But just two months later, and on the other side of the world, a group of men who had been forced to remember the cultivation of indigo would start a series of riots. In the early nineteenth century indigo had returned to India with tremendous energy. England had lost America, and also much of the West Indies. But its citizens still needed blue. What an excellent idea, someone in the East India Company must have thought, to turn back to India for the bulk of England’s dyeing requirements. It was just bad luck for some of the Indians that they did.
In Hindu India, blue is often a lucky color, the color of Krishna, the god who dances through the world, making both love and fun. And on the island of Java23 where Hinduism arrived in around the fourth century A.D. (and did not give way to Islam until the thirteenth century) you can still tell that a shadow puppet represents a noble character from its blue or black face. So it is ironic that the history of indigo over the past four hundred years has not been noble or lucky at all for those who have been forced to be involved with it.
In 1854 a young artist called Colesworthey Grant made a visit to India. Before he left he made a promise to his sisters that he would write regularly—and five years later the letters were published, along with some 160 engravings, as Rural Life in Bengal.24 I read them in the sprawling Indian National Library in Calcutta as swirling fans almost turned the pages for me. Today his letters are important documents about life on an indigo plantation, although I cannot help but feel that the Grant sisters must have been disappointed to plow through so many pages of technical information lightened by almost no brotherly gossip about the colonies.
Grant stayed for a long time (probably too long, as far as his hosts were concerned) at Mulnath, the home of a planter called James Forlong. His host—he told his sisters—used to rise at four and then spend the morning riding twenty miles or more around the property. He told his servants in advance where he intended to take his breakfast, and Grant was much impressed to see that when he arrived at the chosen place, toast and tea would be hot and ready, the servants having “walked there through the night.” Grant noted with great excitement the air of animation around the factory when it was time to gather and process the indigo. The farmers would bring in their indigo to be checked by a man “who with an iron chain of precisely six feet in length measures round the girth of the plant, and as much as this embraces is termed a bundle.” The system was open to abuse—if the measurer pulled the chain tightly, the farmer would get less for his leaves—so there would be plenty of squabbling and bribery involved.
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 arti
st’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 acres27 (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.
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