ABSTRACT
India is believed to be the home of tropical indigo (Gittinger 1982: 22; and Vetterli 1951) which has been extensively traded globally. It had a variety of celebrated uses in ancient times. It was recognized as a medicinal substance (in the Middle East, for example), a substance for cosmetics (like hair dye and skin ointment) and, above all, as a dye for textiles (Balfour-Paul 1997: 155–74) which gained popularity 2 presumably because of the religious sanctity of its colour in Judaism (Scholem 1980), Christianity (Ciba Review 1968) and also Islam (Serjeant 1972). But around the medieval period, India was not apparent on the international map of indigo. It appears from what follows that the industry was resurrected in Bengal 3 during British imperial rule. This was primarily because Great Britain never opted for land-intensive development such as plantations; nor could it sustain indigo plantation perpetually in the colonies of America. Thus, at the mercy of the continent for the supply of such a vital input of its industrial revolution, the country looked to Bengal. The industry accordingly received a growth stimulus in consequence of Britain’s industrial revolution, in sharp contrast to its prototype backwash effects on other colonial ventures. Against this background, the present chapter seeks to situate the industry’s development in the context of the British industrial revolution. In particular, we intend to document how government policies in the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries fostered this development, and how far it promoted welfare in the local milieu. Indeed, there has not yet been any attempt at a systematic historical documentation of Bengal’s indigo dye industry. Some scholarly deliberations that do exist in the literature (for example, Sinha 1961–70: vol. 1, 206–11; Ghosal 1966: 73–94; Kumar 1983: vol. 2, 315–18) are limited to certain specific aspects of the subject which is dealt with along with other contemporary industries. Moreover, an implicit (and wrong) identification of the dye industry with indigo cultivation, in conjunction with a strong allegation about large-scale oppression of indigo cultivators around the 1850s, has created an impression in Indian historiography that the industry was a bane to Bengal. The testing of this hypothesis has, therefore, a topical interest.
