6| Indigo, fabrics and other merchandise

While The Gaze is an original play that does not pretend to be historically correct, a number of historical elements do go into its making. One such element concerns merchandise.

Rajagopal situates the zamindar Kandasami Mudaliar and his business empire in the seashore town of Paḻavēṟkāṭu or Pulicat. From the early 17th century to 1825, when it was taken over by the British, Pulicat was an important Dutch trading post. It had a fort and a ‘faktorij’ (factory) producing gun-powder and its own mint. Pulicat has a natural harbour that was used to reload ships sailing between the Coromandel and Malabar coasts, Burma, the Indonesian archipelago and as far away as the Red Sea and China. Pulicut also has an old Muslim trading community that was involved in boat building. Today Pulicat is a sleepy fisher village to the north of Chennai. Only the cemetery with its enormous tombs and mausoleums carrying inscriptions in the Dutch language remains as a silent witness to the former Dutch colonial presence.

Reading Haafner’s Reize it never becomes clear to me (Hanne) what business he actually was in. It looks like he is dabbing in a variety of things. Asked about the nature of his business in the play he answers: ‘Oh, this and that. Import and export.’ His vagueness with regard to the nature of his trade is immediately understood by his counterpart, the clever Brahmin Bhuvanagiri. For in addition to paddy and other grains, copper, spices, wood for construction, more ‘suspicious’ items such as diamonds and opium were traded. Another important merchandise was locally produced,  finely woven cotton fabric (muslin) and cottons with checkered or striped patterns (the ‘Madras Checks’). And there was a busy trade in dyes also used to colour these fabrics or imprint them with flowery patterns (the famous chintz and kalamkari). Looking into the history of fabrics and dyes opens up a whole new window.

Red dye was obtained from the roots of a plant called cāyavēr in Tamil. Digging up these roots was slave labour — literally — and in the 17th and 18th centuries the Dutch were the nexus of an enormous slave trade (Govindarajan 2017). During years of famine the business in slaves would pick up. People, in particular Dalits, would sell themselves into bondage in order to sustain their family. In the play the character Kandu refers to this practice during the quarrel with his wife Kanakam, who struggles to feed the family. The red dye extracted from cāyavēr reminds me of madder cultivated in the Dutch province of Zeeland where I was born. Until the introduction of chemical dyes, this natural red dye was one of the most important agricultural products in Zeeland. Its history is at display in Museum De Meestoof in St. Annaland, Tholen, where, as in India, the hard labour is emphasized that the harvesting of the roots demanded (van Dijk 1985).

Another well-known dye is indigo (Tamil: avuri) from which a deep blue colour was obtained. In our theatre we still use indigo for the blue make-up of the character of Krishna. The cultivation and production of indigo is usually associated with Bengal, but I discover it was, and still is, grown on the farm of Thiru Sulthanayup in the village of Venkanthur near Dindivanam. Sulthanayup’s ancestors migrated from Mysore to Vellore and then to Venkanthur after the death of Tippu Sultan in 1799. In the theatre world, indigo became famous through the Bengali play Nildarpan written by Dinabandhu Mitra. The play is about the Indigo Revolt of 1859, when farmers refused to sow indigo to protest against exploitative working conditions during the period of British Company rule. In our play-in-progress it are local villagers who protest against exploitation by rich merchants, such as Kandasami Mudaliar, and the government, which refuse to pay them properly for their labour and fail to provide relief bringing them on the brink of starvation.

References

Govindarajan, Vinita (2017), ‘Slaver’s Bay: The little-known history of Dutch slave trade in a small town in Tamil Nadu’, Scroll.on [https://scroll.in/magazine/847865/slavers-bay-the-little-known-history-of-dutch-slave-trade-in-a-small-town-in-tamil-nadu]

History of Pulicat – Wikepedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Pulicat]

Mitra, Dinabandhu (1861/2013). Nildarpan or The Indigo Planting Mirror: A Drama translated from Bengali by a Native. New Delhi: Isha Books.

Van Dijk-van der Peijl, Anneke.(1998 5th edition) Meekrap vroeger en nu. Vereniging van Zeeuwse Musea.