Ajit Balakrishnan: Indigo - stain or missed future?

Imagine you are in 1917, sipping your morning cup of tea and glancing at your newspaper when your eyes light on the following story: a lawyer you have never heard of, but who is reported to be of Gujarati origin and has recently returned from England via South Africa, has wrested major concessions from the British colonial government on behalf of exploited tenant farmers in distant Bihar. The landlords there, mostly British, were forcing these poor tenant farmers to dedicate at least three out of every 20 parts of their landholding to grow a crop the price of which had fallen so precipitously in the recent past that anyone who grew it would suffer grievous losses. The clever landlords had used their connections with the British colonial government in Calcutta to pass laws that would send to jail any tenant farmer who refused to meet this production quota. The newspaper report praised the young lawyer for using his persuasive skills and magical leadership qualities to compel the British authorities to repeal this unjust law and wondered whether his talent would be of use elsewhere in India.

Of course you know the story; every Indian schoolchild does. It was about Mohandas Gandhi, who arrived in India as an unknown lawyer and then led the indigo-growing tenant farmers of Champaran in Bihar out of their cruel obligations. His achievement catapulted him from obscurity to national leadership. Later, writing about the event in his biography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Gandhiji said that "the superstition that the stain of indigo could never be washed out was exploded".

What was never taught to us Indian schoolkids about the Champaran-Indigo-Gandhi story was why the price of indigo had fallen so steeply and so suddenly in the 1910s. Till then, for the previous half-century, the cultivation of indigo had virtually been a licence to print money. The reason is this: decades-long European efforts to produce the highly valued indigo dye through a synthetic method from a cheap waste product called coal tar finally met with success in 1907. Bayer Hoechst, the German company that achieved this breakthrough, had finally mastered the chemical engineering behind this. It then flooded the world market with cheap synthetically produced indigo. Worldwide demand for organically grown indigo collapsed to a sixth of its normal level and its price to a fourth. The wickedness of the British landlords of Champaran lay in using their clout with the British colonial government (we would call it "crony capitalism" today) to force their tenants to grow indigo on a part of their land, whatever be the market price. They were trying to make the best of a dying natural indigo business.

The reason for the sky-high market price for indigo was that cotton or silk cloth dyed indigo blue carried a premium connotation in Europe. The indigo plant, grown primarily in India, was carried to Europe through Arab trade routes even in the Greco-Roman era. The Greek word for the dye, "indikón", stands for "Indian"; the Romans latinised it to "indicum", from where it was anglicised to indigo. Some trace the premium connotations of the colour blue to the Catholic Church's decision in 431 AD to colour-code all their saints with blue. Others claim there were prohibitions in England preventing commoners wearing blue clothes, since it was reserved for the wealthy as a signal of their status.

I sometimes wonder what turn Indian history would have taken if Gandhiji, instead of spending time negotiating with the British government to abolish the laws mandating growth of indigo, had taken the next train to Calcutta, got hold of the many England-educated chemists there (Presidency College was already offering an undergraduate course in chemistry at the turn of the 19th century), and persuaded them to emulate the Germans in producing indigo from synthetic sources.

To get a sense of what we missed, here is an account of what happened to Germany after the synthesis of indigo. By the 1930s, it was accidentally discovered that the red dye that was a by-product of the synthesis of indigo killed streptococci bacteria in mice. The active ingredient, sulfanilamide, was soon extracted and was the first antimicrobial drug. It paved the way for the antibiotic revolution in medicine and the birth of the modern pharmaceutical industry. As a result of these innovations, the Germans created the patent system, chemistry as a science was introduced in schools and colleges, and Germany went on to dominate the world chemical industry for the next 100 years.

The arrival of a new technology triggers conflicts - sometimes violent ones - and it is critically important to read these signals correctly. Do these conflicts signal a real societal injustice or do they mean that a new paradigm, a new future beckons?

Every time I see a name-board for "Bayer", "BASF" or "Agfa", I fall into a deep depression about the future we Indians missed at Champaran in 1917. The "a" in each of these company names stands for "aniline", which is derived from the Arabic word "anil" for blue, which in turn is derived from the Sanskrit word for blue that we use in India to this day: "neel".

Ajit Balakrishnan is the author of The Wave Rider: A Chronicle of the Information Age.
ajitb@rediffmail.com