What goes into the making of Krishna’s blues on paper or palm leaf?

How blue is Krishna? The poet can get away by responding with a metaphor, calling the dark god Ghanashyam, a storm cloud. Krishna, passionate lover, desired by many and desiring many, is the dark cloud, writes the poet, about to descend on the beloved, likened implicitly to the thirsty chataka bird. The word “Krishna” itself means dark, and he is also called “Shyam”, which covers a range of darkness, from blue black to grey, with much in between, even the green of the tenderest grass.

The painter, however, working within the conventions of traditional Indian art, has to put colour on form. What goes into the making of Krishna’s blues on paper or palm leaf? Into the colour of a storm cloud? A 17th-century Pahari miniature painting, originating in Basohli in Jammu and Kashmir titled Krishna Loosens His Beloved’s Belt, can be seen as a perfect realisation of the god’s cloud colour in an image. The same smalt and lead-white pigments, making for a dark, glowering grey, have been used to paint both Krishna and the sky, according to Mapping Color in History (MCH), a digital humanities project at Harvard University, which was conceived in 2018. It is a searchable database of Asian art that analyses paintings to identify colour pigments used in them.

The MCH website allows access to more than 200 paintings and illustrations from Asia, from the 12th to the 19th centuries, along with the analysis of the colours used in them, their date and places of origin. The study of pigments in artworks throws light on cultural practices and social and trade exchanges between places, which can uncover forgotten histories.

The analysis of the 28 colours used in the Pahari painting with Krishna has another striking feature, termed “jaw-dropping” by the project members: the luminous, shimmering green in the painting is no paint, it was found, but the crushed wings of a green beetle.

Most of the images currently in the database are from South Asia, including miniature paintings and illustrations in manuscripts. Currently most of these, other than the palm leaf manuscripts, have been composed on paper. Images from Central Asia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Thailand and Japan are also part of the database.

The database contains illustrations from texts such as Rasikapriya (Connoisseur’s Delights) by Keshava Das, the poet who mentioned Krishna as Ghanashyam (a common epithet) and the chataka birds. Rasikapriya, the Braj Bhasha classic composed in 1591 in the central Indian kingdom of Orchha, was extremely popular and illustrated many times. The illustrations of Rasikapriya in the database are from several manuscripts. One, dated 1615, is titled Toilet of the Nayaka. It shows the man, the nayaka, dressing up, not the nayika, the woman.

“Most pigment databases are based on European and Western art,” says Jinah Kim, principal investigator and project director, MCH. She is the George P. Bickford professor of Indian and South Asian Art and professor of South Asian Studies at Harvard University. Kim, who is from Seoul, South Korea, was recently in Kolkata, where she spoke on From Vision to Matter: Color and Artisanal Intelligence in South Asian Painting at Jadunath Sarkar Resource Centre and Museum. She conducted the research for her first book on illustrated palm-leaf manuscripts and the Buddhist book-cult in South Asia in Kolkata, the city she considers her “home away from home.” She also speaks fluent Bengali.

Kim had always felt drawn to the vibrant primary colours dominant in Indian traditional art and to the materiality of colours, she says in an email after her last visit to Kolkata. A painting is seen as a flat object, but a lot of work goes into the making of it beyond its surface and the materials used in it. “I wanted to find a way to map these elements for my own sake, to understand what’s changing, what’s appearing,” Kim had said in Kolkata.

Her interest led to the genesis of the MCH, a collaborative project that combines history, aesthetics and technology. The analysis of pigments, she says, points at, “first, the availability and trade of new pigments, and second, historical changes in aesthetics, which may be influenced by material availability of certain artists’ materials as well as politics of the time”.

One question she asks pertains to the change in the Indian colour register during the Mughal era: Pastel shades appear in the work of the Mughal Imperial Workshop, when more vibrant primary colours are used in Buddhist, Jain and Hindu paintings. “You start seeing pink, pastel shades, very subtle tonalities that appear in the Mughal work, versus Rajput Mewar work, which is very vibrant,” says Kim. The Rajput paintings dazzle with their oranges, yellows, blues and greens, the Mughal paintings, in contrast, soothe.

“We find four major blue pigments used in India: ultramarine, azurite, smalt (cobalt-containing glassy blue pigment), and indigo. Indigo is almost consistently used throughout time in India, so far the most prevalent blue colourant in our database,” Kim adds. She believes the MCH project may have stumbled upon a significant discovery, which seem to indicate a previously unknown cultural exchange between India and Central Asia, obscured by a pigment imported later from Europe.

Scientists at the Harvard Art Museums and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, whose collections of paintings form a bulk of the database, were able to spot differences between the composition of smalt, the cobalt-containing bright blue pigment, in a Jain manuscript dated 1497, and those found in the later paintings from the Rajput courts. The use of the pigment in Indian painting had long been attributed to Europe, says Kim. The pigment that was seen on materials from India in the 17th century matched closely with the ones made in Europe. But the pigment on the 15th century Jain manuscript was seen to have a very different signature. She also found a Harvard-based study from the 1960s that identified smalt on a wall painting from earlier than the 15th century in Central Asia, in Chinese territory today, suggesting that smalt was in use in India before it came from Europe.

MCH is a work in progress, Kim says, and hopes it will contribute to meaningful research. For the general viewer it brings another kind of comfort. Browsing through the database is pure joy. The images are exquisite, and it is exciting to search them by pigment, colour, date, or any criterion of one’s choice, as each search throws up an enriching, complex intertextuality that suggests everything is connected, especially through art. As art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy wrote about the illustrations of the Rasikapriya manuscript with the image of Nayaka’s toilet: “The manuscript itself is of historical importance as one of a purely Hindū character, but with illustrations in an unmistakably Mughal style, and certainly datable a little before or after AD 1600. Considered simply as Mughal paintings and as works of art, the fine quality of the pictures cannot be overlooked.”

The first image that comes up on Mapping History, without any customised search, is Verbascum Plants. Dated 1224, it comes from Iraq, a beautiful watercolour in delicate shades, from a manuscript of the De Materia Medica by Greek physician Dioscorides (AD 40-90), with the text in Arabic translated from the original Greek.

The image is created with two birds in a symmetrical composition on the leaves of the plant Verbascum (mullein), “which, properly concocted, soothes coughs, toothaches, eye inflammations, and ulcers”, says the accompanying note from Harvard Art Museums. The world could do with some soothing now—and such exchanges.

Chandrima S. Bhattacharya is a journalist based in Kolkata.