’Art & Soul: The colour yellow

Rang kaa umadaa huaa sailab hai har soo magar

Rooh key andhey musavvir ko kahaan pehchan hai?

(There is colour everywhere, flooding us on all sides. But what can the inner eye perceive, if, Like a painter gone sightless, It cannot see?)

I Might have cited it earlier, but my mind travels back again to some years ago, when I came upon an astonishing passage in Frederick Raphael’s review of a book in the Times Literary Supplement. In it the colour yellow figured prominently, even if it was tangential to the context: "Like others", it began, "the most infamous whorehouse in the Tenderloin, the Haymarket, was painted yellow, a colour long associated with Jews, whores, cowards, scabrous French novels and, most recently, London fin-de-siecle decadents."

I was a bit taken aback by the virulent references to the colour. But the images did register themselves upon me. How colours affect us — our emotions, perceptions, decisions, among other things — we all do know, of course. How in them, or our use of them, are reflected our tastes and prejudices, is also something that one is aware of. Some things are easily understood and established: how, for instance, what associations different colours carry in different cultures or the sometimes drastically varying language of sign and symbols that cultures develop.

To take the simplest of examples: pure white is what brides in the western world would don at their wedding ceremony: in our land the colour would be, naturally, red for that for us is the colour of auspiciousness; white would be the colour of sorrow or mourning. Blue in the Islamic world is, or at least once was, associated with funerals — consider the phrase jama-i neel-goon that one comes upon in this context repeatedly in the Shahnama, when great heroes were slain; — here we would associate it, almost naturally, with the great god, Vishnu, his various incarnations, and the nature of his immanence. So on it goes.

Being an art historian, interested especially in painting, colour naturally interests me. Unfortunately, I understand remarkably little about the physics of colour. When scientists speak of electromagnetic waves, wave lengths, billionths of millimetres within which cosmic waves move, and the like, I am completely baffled.

And statements like, "When we see ‘red’, what we are actually seeing is that portion of the electromagnetic spectrum with a wavelength of about 0.0007 mm, in a situation where the other wavelengths are absent", make me seriously question my own level of literacy. But I do pick up books on colours sometimes, and among the latest was one by Victoria Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette, of which a young scholar-colleague kindly gifted me a copy recently. It is a delightful read, part travelogue, part story-travelling, part serious investigative report. Each chapter is named after a colour — ochre, white, red, orange, yellow, green, indigo, violet etc. — and in each she explores, having travelled all across the world, the sources from which these pigments came. Along the trail of her travelling tales, one picks up delicious little facts such as how Cleopatra used to use saffron for seduction, how ultramarine blue was once so expensive that Michelangelo could not afford to buy it himself, or how carmine red, used today in lipsticks, has been extracted since ancient times from kermes insects that inhabit cacti of different kinds.

Stories of corruption and of poisonings emerge from her account, of wars and politics, capital punishment for people using the wrong dyes in cultures of old, and the grievous damaging of the lungs of those who prospect for blue stones under the ground. As I said, it is a racy read, combining personal vignettes and serious research.

My attention in this book went rather naturally to the chapter on the colour yellow which, as I mentioned in an earlier column, especially fascinates me, for it is one of the glories of Indian painting. From her perspective, Finlay writes, "It is the colour of pulsating life: of corn and gold and angelic haloes, and it is also at the same time a colour of bile, and in its sulphurous incarnation it is the colour of the Devil".

Among all the colours, thus, it is the one which gives "the most mixed messages" across cultures. In her chapter, she naturally talks of ‘Indian Yellow" the source of which was a mystery to countless people. She decided to follow the trail of Indian yellow in India, having read in an old, late 19th century report by T.N. Mukharji prepared for British officials, that Indian yellow, called peori, came from the urine of cows that had been fed on mango leaves. Mukharji had stated that most of it came from Monghyr in Bihar. Armed with this information, and filled with excitement, Finlay went to Bihar — her travels through the countryside make for droll reading — looking in village after village for people, or cows, that would give her some clues, but could not find any. Her conclusions therefore? Short of saying that Mr Mukharji’s was a misleading, fabricated report about the source of the Indian yellow, she does cast doubt on his motives. He might have been an honest emissary, she says, but what "if he was a nationalist, wanting to make a point, or at least a joke, at the expense of the British?’ One wonders about this.

I think Finlay’s search might have led her to a different conclusion if she had travelled through Rajasthan where the Indian yellow was in wide use and where painters use it and refer to it even today not only as ‘peori’ but also as ‘gao-goli’, meaning the ‘pellet that comes from a cow’.

Whatever the case, when one thinks of the colour yellow, images of Indian paintings — now from Basohli or Mankot, now from Mewar or Bundi — come crowding to my mind. In these that rich yellow over-garment glistening against the cloud-dark body of Krishna, named by classical writers as the pitambara, or pita-vastra, keeps fluttering in the air. The rich, luminous colour holds things together, lifts the spirit, raises visions. And poets keep placing it at the centre of things. In that wonderful, 18th century painting from Mewar, where Krishna stands in the forest playing upon his flute for sakhis, all colours seem to rush towards him as it were, creating a virtual rainbow, in the words of Bihari:

Adhara dharat Hari key parat otha deetha pata jyota

Harit baans ki baansuri indra-dhanush si hota

(The moment he puts it to his lips, everything begins to glisten: the red of his lips, the black of his eyes, the yellow of his over-garment/ That little green piece of bamboo that is his flute turns everything into a rainbow, it seems.)

This article was published on September 7, 2014