HARKING BACK: When eyes of the world were on Lohari’s ‘Nilli Gali’

If you walk through the old walled city’s oldest gateway - the Lohari Gate - along the way a lane turns off to the right. This is known still as ‘Nilli Gali’, or the blue lane. The name comes from an ancient Indigo Market that once existed here.

As one studies colonial-era trade flows, we find that among the first foreigners to visit Lahore were the Portuguese Jesuit priests from Lisbon. On the face of it they were Christian missionaries, but their hidden agenda was to open up trade routes for their country. The first colonialists to our lands were the Portuguese, who were followed by the Dutch, a few Spaniards also came, and finally the British. Let us bring our focus back a bit and understand the ‘Imperial Game’ of finding profitable trade points in the world. That pursuit still continues.

The main focus of the initial products was indigo and pepper. For indigo they needed to reach the central and western sub-continent, and for pepper they needed to reach the western Indian coast to search southwards. For this they needed Mughal permission, and the only approach possible was a soft one. The ‘open-minded’ Mughal ruler Akbar was willing to listen to different religious beliefs, and so it was that the Jesuits came to Lahore. They managed to get permission for indigo export and set up camp in Tehsil Bazaar, then on the north-western edge of the old walled city.

It might interest the reader to know that indigo itself in the 15thand 16thcentury was known as Lahori Indigo. Once the product reached Lisbon, where the King of Spain, then also ruler of Portugal, wanted a monopoly position. Imagine that in the year 1602AD the import from India to Lisbon stood at 20 tonnes, which given its instant success reached 940 tonnes the next year in 1603. Given the fact that Aleppo was a main trading station in the Mediterranean, we see from market data in London records that the prices were set in Aleppo not Lisbon.

In 1609 it was clear that from Lahore flowed major shipments of indigo, silk brought down from Kashmir and cotton fabrics. For this reason London traders sent Thomas Mun to visit Aleppo and explore products from India. His report startled London traders who sent over an English trader William Finch who came to Lahore and reached the calculation that after all costs are accounted for the product gave a 400 per cent profit.

It might surprise readers that the scandal of Anarkali and Akbar and Saleem was first narrated by Finch in his diary titled ‘Pilgrime’. He had heard this story from other indigo traders in Nilli Gali. The arrival of Finch had startled the Portuguese who tried to scuttle his ships at Surat, which was his starting point.

On a larger canvas we see war break out between the English and Portuguese over eastern trade routes. We see a series of battles between the British and Spaniards and Portuguese at sea. The French were also active in sea warfare while the Dutch, subtle operators, took a backseat. Luckily for the English the fleet of Barbarossa (real name Khairuddin the Ottoman Turk) crushed the Spaniards in 1529 in a number of sea battles in the Mediterranean. This opened the sea route for the English.

After setting up a business in Lahore, William Finch loaded a large ship with indigo and set off from Lahore’s Khizri Gate (now Sheranwala) and sailed down the Ravi towards Multan and then Kolachi (Karachi) and onwards towards Aleppo. In William Finch’s ‘Pilgrime’ he describes the origins of the word ‘Indigo’ as rooted in the Greek word ‘Indicum’ which means from India. The Romans called it ‘Indigom’ while the English called it ‘Indigo’. In his description Finch describes how he left raw eggs near an indigo ‘dusting place’ only to find by the evening when he went to get them cooked as being blue from the inside.

Just what was the magic of this dye that got nations to fight over it. In an earlier piece I had used a source from the archives of the East India Company to work out its worth. The document (EIC Report to GC 25.6.1793) states that indigo shipments from Lahore, Bengal and Bihar had an average price of indigo in 1793 was £3.56 for one pound weight. One calculation, which I certainly cannot vouch for, but it exists on EIC record, the total export to all countries was worth £43 trillion. My scepticism is because of the unbelievably staggering numbers.

But it does explain colonial interest in the sub-continent. Mind you this is just one product. Mind you an Oxford scholar in his Ph.D. dissertation has mentioned the total wealth of the Mughal sub-continent as being 32.8 per cent of the entire world’s wealth then. But then by the late 17thcentury the Europeans had started growing ‘woad’ as a substitute for the super expensive indigo. By 1860 the Germans had come up with a chemical ‘indigo-coloured’ dye.

The decline of Nilli Gali started with these developments. The importance of indigo to Lahore can well be gauged if you visit the oldest Christian graveyard of Lahore, which is just next to the Sacred Heart School near Nila Gumbad. Graves from the pre-Sikh era can still be seen in the unkempt graveyard with many names followed by the description ‘Indigo Farmer’.

In an earlier piece I had quoted a Portuguese Jesuit archive document which described a grave of an Italian architect who assisted Ustad Ahmed Lahori in designing the Taj Mahal. We know from different sources that Ustad Lahori’s fingers - probably it is legend - were cut off by Shah Jehan while the Venetian was executed and buried in this graveyard. A search of the graveyard did not yield any such marked grave.

Now to some ‘not so boring’ statistics. In 1619 indigo imports that landed in London from various sources touched 4,300 tonnes. Amsterdam markets received over 1,000 tonnes. The Dutch were clever businessmen and they capitalised the East Indian ports for the product. The sheer monetary value of this trade forced Emperor Shah Jehan to wage war on the Portuguese. The sheer amount of money involved can be gauged from the fact that a 1641 Dutch document records one factory as having 12,000 maunds, or 444,000 pound weight. There were good and bad years for the crop, but one can imagine the wealth that flowed from the sub-continent over the next 300 years from numerous products.

Today scholars accept that without the sub-continent Europe would not be what it is today. This brings into focus the strategy of setting up factors, or factories on the coasts, going on to convert them into forts to defend their trade, and for the defence of the forts they acquired large tracts of land and further to capture entire States and eventually the entire sub-continent. Call it creeping Imperial Capitalism.