A story of colours

March.12 : Turquoise, we are told, is the colour of 2010.
Pantone, the company whose name is synonymous with colour, selects “the colour of the year” based on the prevailing global mood. Turquoise, it says, “evokes thoughts of soothing, tropical waters and a languorous, effective escape from the everyday troubles of the world, while at the same time restoring our sense of wellbeing”.
Its colour for 2009 was “mimosa, a warm, engaging yellow” because “in a time of economic uncertainty and political change, optimism is paramount and no other colour expresses hope and reassurance more than yellow”. Michelle Obama picked sunny yellow for the inauguration dress in 2009.

I don’t know if Pantone’s choice is considered the last word or it’s just clever branding, but the company is the world authority that defines the standard for colour. If you want to know the exact colour percentage for lipstick red or purple orchid, consult their colour catalogues that every designer and printer uses as a reference guide.
In India, colours have a deep significance. Blue, the colour of Lord Krishna, is associated with divinity. Yellow is the colour of purity, and gerua, a shade of ochre, is associated with renunciation. Auspicious colours are red and yellow; white is the colour of mourning. Unlike the West, we never wear black or white to a wedding. All of us have our favourite colours that evoke certain emotions and memories. Whenever I think of turquoise I think of the sea, of a swimming pool, or a seaside holiday; I also associate it with Persian architecture and domes of mosques, and Native American jewellery. My most recent — and vivid — memory of turquoise, however, is from the James Cameron movie Avatar: the skin of the indigenous Na’vi people is a blue bordering on turquoise.
Turquoise, says Victoria Finlay in her book, Colour: Travels
Through the Paintbox, is “the colour that separates green from blue”. The name, it is said, comes from the French for Turkish but she says it is more likely to have come from Persia.
In my mind, the colour that comes closest to turquoise is ultramarine blue, like the fabric whitener we use at home. Finlay says this blue was made of lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone found in Afghanistan. It was once more expensive than gold and Michelangelo left one of his paintings unfinished because even he could not afford to buy the blue paint.
Long before the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas, the statues are said to have auras the colour of ultramarine (meaning “beyond the seas” in Italian). According to Finlay, who travelled to the North-West Frontier, this was the “first known use of the paint anywhere”.
Finlay is essentially a journalist: her story of the origins of colours is part history and part travelogue packed with anecdotes. And both make fascinating reading.
Ochre (iron oxide) was the first colour paint. The indigenous Americans came to be known as Red Indians because they painted themselves with ochre.
The original red — aka carmine or crimson — was extracted from the cochineal beetle that fed on the leaf of a cactus in South America. The Inca women used it as a blusher. The British East India Company tried to grow the cacti in India “but by the time the ship sailed into Calcutta carrying cochineals only one leaf with bugs was left”.
Finlay’s search for the story of indigo (a Greek term meaning “from India”) takes her to the Tollygunge Club in Calcutta which, she had heard, was set in an indigo plantation, but there was no sign of the shrub. And then she goes to Monghyr in Bihar to solve the mystery of Indian Yellow (legend has it that it was made from the urine of cows fed on mango leaves). It remains a mystery.
The history of colours is bit like that of spices: in global trade, there was secrecy, politics, competition and even intrigue. The Spanish colonisers kept the source of the colour red (the cochineal beetle) secret; the British East India Company desperately tried to harvest cochineal in India. 
My favourite story is the war of the lead pencil, a British monopoly in those days. When Britain refused to sell graphite to France, the French asked Nicholas Conté, a painter, to find a substitute. Conté was the one who began the system of lead grading: H for hardness and B for blackness (the more Hs, the lighter the pencil).
Finlay’s book is not new; I bought it in 2002 but read it only recently when I was intrigued by a news item on Pantone’s colour-of-the-year announcement. Apart from the story of colours, the book has many nuggets of information — for example, Indian Ink was actually made in China. Or, the word “miniature” in painting does not refer to its size. It comes from the word “minium”, a name for red lead that was popular with Persian and Mughal artists.

Shekhar Bhatia can be contacted at shekhar.bhatia@gmail.com [2]

Shekhar Bhatia