Color: A Natural History of the Palette (50 page)

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 Purple.” 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.

Coal tar, an organic substance that comes from very ancient fossilized trees, proved to hold the potential for thousands of colors, and Perkin’s invention went on to inspire chemists to find many other petrochemical paints and dyes. Within a decade they would almost totally replace many of the colors that have been the subject of this book. Moreover, as Simon Garfield showed in his book
Mauve
, Perkin’s discovery would have many beneficial medical and commercial spin-offs and would lead other scientists to the discovery of cholera and tuberculosis bacilli, to chemotherapy, immunology, and the mixed blessing of saccharine. Some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in Europe today—including BASF, Ciba and Bayer—began as small dye works in those crazy days of trying to extract more and more colors from coal.

But the frenzy of the “mauve decade” would also revive interest in that earlier purple, from the mysterious Tyre. Within four years the French Emperor Napoleon III would send an archaeological expedition to try to find out where this place was, and whether anything remained of its riches. And some years later a number of Jewish scholars saw what Perkin had done and began what turned out to be the very slow process of unravelling the mystery of the most sacred thread in Judaism.

Tyrian purple, educated Victorians knew, was made from shellfish found in the eastern Mediterranean. But which ones, and how they were processed, was not known in those mauve days of the 1850s. The old-time dyers had disappeared with the storming of Constantinople in 1453 (or even before: possibly the last recorded mention of purple dyeing as an ongoing industry was in Benjamin of Tudela’s journal in 1165 when he mentioned that the Jewish community of Thebes was famous for its production of silk garments and purple) and they had not left any records of their secrets. Nor was anyone quite sure what their finished product looked like either. Was the purple dye of Imperial Rome similar to the shade that Perkin had discovered—an almost gaudy version of the final shivers in the spectrum? Or was it a different, more mystical color appropriate for a man who had the blessings of the gods behind him to wear in public? And what—or where—was Tyre anyway?

When I decided to find purple for myself this last question was easily answered. A quick consultation of the
Times Atlas
confirmed that Tyre—or Sour, Sur or Tyr, as it is variously spelled—was the most southern port in Lebanon. It was north of the disputed Israeli border and south of the capital of Beirut. But to answer those other questions—about the nature of the dye works, about why their famous product was so highly prized, and whether it was reddish or bluish or something quite different—I decided to begin by going to the source of the dye, or at least to the source of the name of the dye.

A FUNERAL

When I arrived in Beirut my ultimate quest was of course to find purple. But my primary aim that first morning was to find coffee. On most days this would be even easier than locating a bullet-marked wall in the city’s war-torn center, but my timing could not have been worse. It was the funeral of Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, who had died a few days before, and Lebanon was closed out of respect for its more powerful northern and eastern neighbor. Even those places from which the aromas of
arabica
wafted like seductive genies to beguile me were “closed,” with proprietors shooing me away with worried looks. One café owner said the fines for not grieving publicly were higher than small businesses could afford: if they had admitted a paying customer that day they could have been bankrupted.

One of the cafés where I couldn’t buy coffee had a TV playing. Grim-faced men in suits were escorting a coffin along a street in Damascus lined with people wearing black. It is curious that now black and only black is the color of mourning in many countries (except in parts of Asia, where people wear white), but as recently as the 1950s purple was just as appropriate at British funerals. When King George VI died in 1952, black and mauve knickers were solemnly placed in haberdashers’ windows in the West End, a columnist in a British paper remembered recently,
⁴
while British court circulars included mauve in their rule of dress for half-mourning until around that time.
⁵

Black and white seem to represent absolutes—either the total absorption of light as you leave the world, or the total reflection of the light as you return to a state of luminosity, depending on your belief in incarnation. And violet is the last color in the rainbow spectrum, symbolizing both the ending of the known and the beginning of the unknown—which is perhaps why it was also suitable. The seventh-century saint Isidore of Seville, who incidentally is now the patron saint of the Internet because of his genius for compiling facts, suggested in his
Etymologiae
that the word “purpura” came from the Latin
puritae lucis
, meaning “purity of light.” It is probably not true, but it played a useful public relations role for purple right up until the Renaissance, and was perhaps instrumental in keeping it a color associated with the spirit.
⁶
Certainly, by the time Victorians were wearing Perkin’s mauve in funeral processions, purple had been the color of grief in Britain for several centuries already: on September 16, 1660 Samuel Pepys wrote that he had gone “to White Hall garden, where I saw the King in purple mourning for his brother [the Duke of Gloucester, who had died three days earlier of the smallpox].”

Where was everyone? I wondered as I strolled through Beirut streets that had barely a car or even a pedestrian in them. When I reached the Corniche—the palm-fringed esplanade where once Beirut’s playboys drove their sports cars to show off—I found half my answer: the jagged rocks beneath the road were covered with beach towels and holiday-makers chatting and bathing. A normal holiday in the sunshine, but there was just one odd thing about it. They were all men.

It was lunchtime before I found any breakfast, so I enjoyed midday coffee and yogurt in the restaurant at the top of the five-star Sofitel, which was the only place I found open. My table overlooked what once must have been a chic seaside club, and my little mystery was solved. The private swimming pools far below were empty of water but packed full of sunbathing women crowded together and enjoying the rays from behind high walls. My quest for imperial purple was connected with loss and luxury, with hidden things, and of course with the sea: I wondered whether my whole experience of Lebanon would demonstrate those elements quite so neatly as my first day had done.