Contemporary art is commonly parodied for its use of bodily waste – urine on canvases, faeces in tin cans, menstrual blood as set up. But rewind two centuries and you’ll discover that whereas excretory supplies might not have made it to the content material of pictures, they nonetheless did function elements for his or her manufacturing.
Two luminous substances in art and early photography embody this intersection of excreta and visible tradition in Nineteenth-century South Asia: the medieval pigment referred to as Indian yellow, and Bengal mild, one of many first ever synthetic photographic lighting sources. Both applied sciences of illumination have been derived in Bihar from bovine urine and concerned processes of manufacturing and distribution which were both traditionally documented or chemically recovered comparatively not too long ago. Furthermore, each mirrored a colonial advanced of political, financial and visible governance.
Among the 2, Indian yellow is by far the extra intriguing, partly because of what art historian BN Goswamy as soon as referred to as the “mystique” surrounding its preparation. A 2008 research contended that Indian yellow – additionally recognized as peori, purree and gogoli in literature – was used to render the moon and stars in Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889). There might have been a conceptual logic to its celestial deployment: chemist and portray technologist Alexander Eibner described it as “incomparably beautiful, deep and luminescent gold yellow in a shade…achieved with no other pigment”.
Possibly originating in Persia and used in Mughal, Rajasthani and Pahari work between the sixteenth and Nineteenth century, it discovered its approach to Britain in the late 18th century, in keeping with Artists’ Pigments: A Handbook of Their History and Characteristics Volume 1 (1985). Its creative legitimacy was sealed when it was listed in {the catalogue} of the main British high quality art provides producer Winsor & Newton in 1840.
Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’. Credit: Wikimedia Commons [Public Domain].
Almost since its look in the English archive in the 1780s, Indian yellow has attracted consideration not just for its delicate fulgence but additionally, in its uncooked type, its odour, “the roughly shaped round lumps…accompanied by a smell of urine,” as famous by art historian RD Harley in Artists’ pigments c.1600-1835 : a research in English documentary sources (2001). For greater than a century, this stench fuelled hypothesis. Chemist Rebecca Ploeger and conservator Aaron Shugar recount in their essay The Story of Indian Yellow – Excreting a Solution that repeated makes an attempt have been made to determine the malodorous pigment’s natural origin, with theories starting from camel urine and beaver castoreum to tree sap.
Finally, in 1883, in response to an inquiry undertaken by the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, TN Mukharji, an Indian civil servant and indigenous supplies skilled, travelled to Monghyr to witness the making of peori. In his article in the Journal of the Society of Arts, Mukharji documented how a caste of milkmen would accumulate the bilious, vibrant yellow urine of cows fed solely on mango leaves and water, precipitate it into pellets, and dry them for export to London.
Rival of the solar
The second visible know-how not directly derived from cattle urine was Bengal mild, a saltpetre-based compound lengthy often called a firework. Photography historian Niharika Dinkar, the one scholar to have written extensively about Bengal mild, explains in her essay Pyrotechnics And Photography: Saltpeter And The Colonial History Of Photographic Lighting (2021) that its intense, actinic blue flame attracted experimenters for many years earlier than it was patented in 1857 by John Moule to be used as an synthetic lighting materials in portrait photography in the type of a hexagonal gadget referred to as the Photogen.
Like Indian yellow, Bengal mild was accompanied by “noxious fumes” when it was burned to generate the 15-second-long smoulder that allowed for the portrait to be taken. In 1883, the identical 12 months Mukharji undertook the sector journey to Mongyr, saltpetre-based Bengal mild was tailored to be used in a transportable equipment referred to as the Luxograph, which comprised “a concave reflector fitted with glass mosaic like bits” and lowered the flare period to 5 seconds.
In his essay The Indian Saltpeter Trade, The Military Revolution, And The Rise Of Britain As A Global Superpower (2009), historian James Frey offers an account of the manufacturing of military-use saltpetre in India in addition to its commodification by European empires. Since the early trendy interval, India’s superlative saltpetre was used for making gunpowder, with the area between Jaunpur and Bengal rising as “the premiere saltpeter-producing region of India”. By the 18th century, Patna had turn out to be the hub of worldwide commerce round saltpetre, with Dutch, French and British buying and selling corporations competing aggressively (the British monopolised 70% of the market share).
A pattern of Indian yellow from the historic dye assortment on the Technical University of Dresden, Germany. Credit: Shisha-Tom/Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 3.0].
The compound was mined by licensed members of the nuniya caste, “whose occupation involved earth working and construction”. Believing saltpetre to be a by-product of cattle urine, nuniyas sought out “salt earth” in locations the place livestock congregated. During the monsoon, they’d plough the urine into the soil, lixiviate the residue that surfaced after the rains, and then boil the brine to separate the potassium from the nitrates over a number of evaporation cycles. Finally, the precipitate was purified in a regional European refinery earlier than being exported.
Unlike gunpowder, which exploited saltpetre’s explosive drive, its use in pyrotechnics and photographic lighting required managed combustion. Bengal mild exemplified this calibrated launch of power. Dinkar factors to commercials for the Photogen that declared it to be a “rival of the sun”, at the same time as critics dismissed the pictures it lit as “ghastly and gravelike”. An identical paradox attends Indian yellow. Chemist George Field noticed in The Rudiments of Colours and Colouring (1870) that in watercolour the pigment “resists the sun’s rays with singular power” but in oil it’s “exceedingly fugitive”, that’s, lightfast.
The metaphorical language of rivals and fugitives trying to seize the blue dazzle of Bengal mild and the wealthy gleam of Indian yellow takes on an intense hue in the context of the imperial aesthetic-industrial advanced in which these supplies circulated. At the tip of the Nineteenth century, Indian yellow was seen in canvases throughout Europe and Bengal mild lit up phases, caves and monuments just like the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum and Niagara Falls as public lighting throughout evening shoots. This glow, nevertheless, was not benign. It symbolised the extractive infrastructures of the empire that transformed indigenous Indian sources and processes – cow urine, mango leaves and mineral-rich soil – into media for visible cultural manufacturing that profited the Raj.
A seventh-generation painter, Shammi Bannu Sharma possesses maybe the one identified pattern of the genuine gogoli Indian yellow pigment preserved inside India. Credit: Kamayani Sharma.
Colonial racial politics colored using Indian yellow each explicitly and implicitly. Art historian Jordana Bailkin notes in her essay Indian Yellow: Making and Breaking the Imperial Palette (2005) that “in Europe, Indian yellow…was praised for its fineness in conveying the subtleties of skin colors…When mixed with vermilion or hematite, Indian yellow was said to be especially useful in creating a dark brown flesh tone”. But regardless of its aesthetic suitability, it was politically fraught.
In 1908, Indian yellow was informally banned (there isn’t a official file) by the British authorities, resulting in the eventual ceasing of its manufacturing and use by the Nineteen Twenties. Bailkin interprets this discouragement in the context of the proto-Hindu nationalist cow safety motion of the late Nineteenth century, embodied by the Cow Protection Societies or Gaurakshini Sabhas. This motion reasserted caste-based social norms round purity and air pollution in opposition to British makes an attempt to desacralise the cow in the Indian Penal Code in the 1860s. Bailkin reads the ban as each appeasement and energy play to counter swadeshi boycotts: “The fact that cow protection came primarily from an indigenous vigilante source of power led the British to reassert their dominance through their own forms of protection: that is, the disuse of Indian yellow.”
At the identical time, the demand for Indian saltpetre was declining too. Dinkar notes that in the very 12 months Photogen was devised in Britain, an organization in the United States began manufacturing saltpetre from Peruvian sodium nitrate “to break free from British monopoly”. No longer was making Bengal mild depending on nuniya labour or the cow urine-enriched soil of japanese India. After that, the Indian saltpetre trade survived for only some extra many years. Its remaining collapse got here in 1909, across the similar time because the Indian yellow ban, with the event of the Haber-Bosch course of that produced artificial saltpetre from atmospheric nitrogen.
A paint field in Sharma’s studio. Credit: Kamayani Sharma.
Scientific experiments ultimately demystified Indian yellow as effectively. While its distinguishing part – euxanthic acid, comprising euxanthone and glucuronic acid – had been recognized approach again in 1845, questions round its manufacturing course of had endured. Confident in his findings, TN Mukharji felt he had settled the matter conclusively as soon as he had dispatched samples of Monghyr peori and related cow urine to Kew. Instead, his testimony was doubted for over a century.
In Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox (2003), journalist Victoria Finlay adopted Mukharji’s path in the district of Monghyr, now Munger, solely to be disenchanted that no one in the village had heard of peori, a lot much less the way it was as soon as made. “What if,” she puzzled, “[Mukharji] was a nationalist, wanting to make a point, or at least a joke, at the expense of the British?” It wasn’t till 2019, when Ploeger and Shugar in their investigation of Mukharji’s samples at Kew found a chemical marker of mammalian urine referred to as hippuric acid, that the Indian officer’s integrity was upheld.
That it took a century and a chemical – left behind in a British archive – to substantiate an Indian civil servant’s eyewitness account is a metaphor for the colonial regime of logistics and data that transformed cow urine into radiance, on canvas and in pictures. The tales of Indian yellow and Bengal mild elucidate not only a quirky intersection of visible historical past with the metabolisms of animals, however of empire.
Epilogue
While Munger might not have had solutions, one other location simply may. Artists’ Pigments states that peori could possibly be obtained from Jaipur, the place it was often called gogoli which means “cow earth”. In a 2014 article on Indian yellow, BN Goswamy quotes a recent miniaturist, who cites an eminent master-painter of Jaipur, Bannu, “perhaps the last Master to use it”. The miniaturist differentiated between gogoli and the chrome-cadmium combination “now designated as peori, once another name for the real gao-goli, but now to be distinguished from it”.
To discover out extra, I visited the Jaipur studio of the late ustad Bannu’s son, Shammi Bannu Sharma, a seventh-generation painter whose ancestors had moved from Aligarh to Rajasthan’s courts in the 18th century. The noon solar streaming into Sharma’s first flooring atelier falls on the kharal in which he grinds stones into powder pigments, the palettes in which he retains them and the chowki at which he works. Atop the desk are a small white bowl and saucer with dried blotches of yellow.
The golden sheen that gogoli imparts to Sharma’s portray turns into much more radiant below UV mild. Credit: Kamayani Sharma.
The splotches are particular: Sharma possesses maybe the one identified pattern of the genuine gogoli Indian yellow pigment preserved inside India, the rest held in industrial and tutorial archives in the United Kingdom and the United States. He remembers his grandfather and father storing the fabric in little cylindrical containers at a time when many conventional artist households left the occupation. “Leftover Indian yellow pigment was still found in their homes,” he stated. “When the older artists died, the younger generations didn’t know what the pigment was for. Some people even mixed it with lime to whitewash their houses.”
He inherited the pigment from his famend father in 2000, when buddies persuaded the ailing maestro Bannu – who saved a distance from his son’s apply – to view Sharma’s work: “He sat for 10–15 minutes on a chair, then stood up, walked toward a pichwai painting I had just finished and looked closely. He praised the work and asked why I hadn’t used gogoli to paint Krishna’s lalat [forehead] and srngar [adornment]. I didn’t deem my work worthy of such a precious colour. He said, ‘Whose is it, if not yours? How much do you think I’m going to use now?’ From that day onward, I’ve always given a touch of goguli to my paintings.”
The important indicator of true gogoli – as opposed to what’s termed peori as of late – is its lustre, sharply seen in ultraviolet mild. Sharma strikes a UV torch throughout considered one of his work that includes Krishna and the serpent Kaliya to correctly respect the sheen of gold on the deity’s robes, jewelry, nimbus, in addition to the flecks on the naga’s physique. As this sparing utility suggests, Sharma is economical and cautious with the heirloom gogoli, utilizing it just for Krishna’s lalat, srngar and dhoti. “I have a few grams left,” he stated. “For my lifetime, that will be enough.”
Kamayani Sharma is an impartial author, researcher and podcaster primarily based in New Delhi. This undertaking was made potential below the Scroll x MMF Arts Writer Grant.
