If I was to choose a favourite word, I might have chosen this one; Indigo. I have written about this before (here) when I said this;

I think it reminds me of something half remembered from primary school- a reading set of books that only the keen readers ever progressed to taking home.

Or an ink pen whose innards bled blue blood all over my fingers.

It describes colour, distance, depth. It contains a promise of space beyond space- like a night sky.

Gregory of Nyssia, a 4th Century mystic, likened the move towards God as to a journey into holydarkness. He suggested that the deeper and further we go, the more darkness we find in the light. For him, God is unknowable- a dark purple mystery, drawing us on- calling us to explore further and further…

Indigo.

In we go.

Then I discover something I did not know about indigo; and that is that like sugar, tobacco, mahogany and many other exotic luxuries that we have come to believe should be ours almost by right, indigo has had a terrible cost.

See for yourself;

 

Indigo

BY CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI

Benegal, 1779-1859

The fields flame with it, endless, blue

as cobra poison. It has entered our blood

and pulses up our veins

like night. There is no other color.

The planter’s whip

splits open the flesh of our faces,

a blue liquid light trickles

through the fingers. Blue dyes the lungs

when we breathe. Only the obstinate eyes

 

refuse to forget where once the rice

parted the earth’s moist skin

and pushed up reed by reed,

green, then rippled gold

like the Arhiyal’s waves. Stitched

into our eyelids, the broken dark,

the torches of the planter’s men, fire

walling like a tidal wave

over our huts, ripe charred grain

that smelled like flesh. And the wind

screaming in the voices of women

dragged to the plantation,

feet, hair, torn breasts.

 

In the worksheds, we dip our hands,

their violent forever blue,

in the dye, pack it in great embossed chests

for the East India Company.

Our ankles gleam thin blue from the chains.

After that night

many of the women killed themselves.

Drowning was the easiest.

Sometimes the Arhiyal gave us back

the naked, swollen bodies, the faces

eaten by fish. We hold on

 

to red, the color of their saris,

the marriage mark on their foreheads,

we hold it carefully inside

our blue skulls, like a man

in the cold Paush night

holds in his cupped palms a spark,

its welcome scorch,

feeds it his foggy breath till he can set it down

in the right place,

to blaze up and burst

like the hot heart of a star

over the whole horizon,

a burning so beautiful you want it

to never end.

 

 

Note

Paush: name of a winter month in the Bengali calendar

The planting of indigo was forced on the farmers of Bengal, India, by the British, who   exported it as a cash crop for almost a hundred years until the peasant uprising of I860, when the plantations were destroyed.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, “Indigo,” from Leaving Yuba City: Selected Poems (New York: Anchor Books Doubleday, 1997).