’Art & soul
The story of ink

The use of ink dates back to the third millennium BC, says B.N. Goswamy

Detail of a corroded folio of a manuscript discovered by Sir Aurel Stein in Central Asia.

One has been using ink from the time one learnt how to write, much as in the history of man ink has been used almost from the time man began to write. But how much attention does one pay to ink as a substance even as one is using it? Or to its history across time and cultures? I confess I knew remarkably little about ink or inks other than going, as a child, to the grocer/stationer and asking for "pakki siyahi" rather than "katchi siyahi", for that is what our teacher instructed us to do. Carefully, the grocer would pick a pinch-full of black ink flakes, wrap them in a piece of paper, and hand the packet over for us to go home, pour it into a little earthen inkwell, add water and a little gum, and be ready for the next morning in school.

What I also remember when I grew up and started researching manuscripts as one of my interests is how many of these bear, on their fly-leaves or end-papers, scribbled notes — apparently by scribes, not the writers or owners — on how to make ink. ‘Siyahi banaane ka nuskha’, or something like this, the note would read, and it would contain the ingredients and proportions of the siyahi used in the manuscript, or another recipe for it learnt from someone else after the manuscript was completed. Even though inks can be of different colours, it was always siyahi — from Persian siyah, meaning black — that was the subject.

Beyond these stray things, I knew little about the subject. It was, however, a short article on inks by a researcher associated with the celebrated Silk Road project that ignited my interest in inks: on the corrosive effect that some inks have on writing surfaces, in particular. I started reading on the subject and am now in a position at least to list — as a measure of my own ignorance — the things that I did not know about inks. I did not, for instance, even know that what is generally referred to as ‘India Ink’ is much the same as ‘China Ink’, and that writing inks date to the third millennium BC, having been also used in Egypt.

The standard way of making it was by gathering soot from burnt wood or resin, often called lampblack, which was ground with a solution of gums and then moulded into small sticks to be mixed with water before use. In China legend has it that black ink was invented by a philosopher, Tien-Lcheu, precisely in 2697 BC, but it became common only by 1200 BC. Another thing I did not know anything about is what was an item of standard use in Europe for centuries: iron gall ink. A gall is any abnormal vegetable growth or excrescence on plants, caused by various agents, as insects, fungi, bacteria, etc. Iron gall ink is essentially created by "the chemical reaction between tannic acid which is present in galls and iron sulfate in an aqueous solution". A black pigment is produced by the reaction, and this becomes the basis of iron gall ink. Once invented, iron gall ink became almost universal in use, at least in the western world, and was highly prized for centuries because of its durability. But there is a flip side to this ink: over long periods of time it turns corrosive and eats into the surface of the paper on which it is used. There are inherent problems in its use, therefore, even though they were not present to the minds of countless scribes and writers when they used it.

Interestingly, iron gall ink started being widely replaced by India ink from the beginning of the 20th century. Because of its composition, which does not contain iron or iron sulfate, India Ink, or China Ink, stands the test of time much better, not fading even when exposed to light and air. There are countless other aspects to inks, and ink-making of course: the economics of it, the invention of differently coloured inks, the problem of clogging, the degrees of brightness in ink, inks that are fugitive and meant to disappear. But puzzles remain.

One of them is the cause of corrosion — seen in the illustration accompanying this piece, which looks more like an abstract painting than a manuscript fragment — that was observed in some seventh century Sanskrit manuscripts discovered in Central Asia. Was iron gall ink also used in the East in those early times, researchers are beginning to wonder, or was it because some corrosive botanical ingredient like sour pomegranate skin was added by some ink-maker during the process of making India/China ink then commonly used?

There are no easy answers. Or at the very least they will be long in coming. Meanwhile, one contemplates with mystification and delight the reported practice, in the medieval Islamic world, of petitioners making their way to the royal courts wearing white garments inscribed with their grievances or plaints written in ink. Perhaps it was this practice that the great poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz had in his mind when he wrote:

(It was the likes of us on whose garments things were written with siyahi in full public gaze. And yet, ‘adorned’ with these very smudges, we kept making our way to the ‘beloved’s’ home.)

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