निळा सावळा ...Ajanta Blue

ही पोस्ट वाचण्याआधी ह्या ब्लॉगवरची जुलै १४ २०२० ची ही पोस्ट ('प्रशियन, कोबाल्ट, अल्ट्रामरीन) निळासांवळा..... Starry Night Over the Rhône') वाचा. 

मी एक अतिशय सुंदर पुस्तक डिसेंबर २०२० मध्ये वाचायला सुरवात केली 'The Greek Experience of India: from Alexander to the Indo-Greeks' by Richard Stoneman.

Pigments, naturally, were not imported from Greece. The pigments used at Ajanta are all derived from local materials, whether earths or plants, plus lamp black. Blue, orange, brown, green and purple are the most common colours in the later Ajanta murals. The earliest ones also use considerable quantities of white (from roots of Ipomoea digitata, with occasional substitutes, or from lime and gypsum), but in these the other colours have been much darkened, and are hard to study in the half-dark of the caves: reds, yellows, and browns are visible, as well as blues, so darkened now as to look black. Aided by some restoration in the last decade or so, vivid faces loom from the darkness, often topped by the voluminous turbans so typical of Maurya and Śunga figures, and shown in three-quarter profile like many of the faces in Macedonian tombs....

... Strong blues are the hardest colours to obtain in nature (lapis lazuli is the key ingredient), and Pliny has a good deal to say about indigo, ‘a product of India, being a slime that adheres to the scum upon reeds. There is another kind of it that floats on the surface of the pans in the purple dye-shops, and this is the “scum of purple”.’ Pliny shows marked distaste for this mucky but expensive substance, despite its known value also as a medicament for wounds. Later he is able to drag in Indian dyes as another illustration of his perennial theme of the moral decline of Rome caused by luxury:

Nowadays when purple finds its way even on to party-walls and when India contributes the mud of her rivers and the gore of her snakes and elephants, there is no such thing as high-class painting.¹⁰⁸

His account of indigo’s production is far from accurate. It was an important dye in India – where it is called nila – from at least 3000 BCE. It is produced from the leaves of the indigo plant by long boiling and treading, and throughout most of its history the reducing agent used to turn it from a pigment to dye has been urine – which may explain some of Pliny’s disgust, since the manufacture of indigo is certainly very smelly. (It is also very labour-intensive, and in 1859–60, just two years after the Indian Rebellion [‘Indian Mutiny’], the conditions of near-slavery in which it was produced led to riots in Bengal.)^"