Why Mamata's idea of a blue Kolkata differs from pink Jaipur

On Friday, The Indian Express provided Jaipur’s pinkness as a “parallel” to Mamata Banerjee’s plan in motion to have Kolkata painted blue. The newspaper did no justice to the cause by printing a black and white picture of the freshly painted blueness of facades in her constituency. The web edition shows it is actually an intermittent use of blue and green. The blue is strong, the green a shade most seen on mosques. And the combination’s aesthetics such that an outburst an “yuck!” The justification for blue is also derived from the blue used to paint facades in Jodhpur, which however is a gentler aqua blue. Jodhpur’s blue is like the shade white washers of yore managed by adding Robin Blue to chuna, that is, lime.[caption id=“attachment_1575183” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. AFP[/caption] Mamata Didi is scant concerned about the coffers of the civic body depleting this fiscal by offering an exemption from payment of the house tax. Imagine if the CPM had acted similarly and had Kolkata painted red! Such strong colours play on the psyche of the people especially when it becomes universal across a city. But I digress. My point is about Jaipur is called a pink city. It is pink if pink is a shade of terracotta which it is not. To start with, Jaipur had no pink anywhere when Sawai Jai Singh built the country’s first planned city and founded it in 1727. He had wanted it to be distinct and wanted to mimic the red sandstone construction which was unavailable in his territory. Jai Singh opted for a terracotta layer as paint over the outer lime sheath of his buildings. To provide the marble inlay impression, lime was used and polished, and lo and behold, he had his make-believe walls. A walk through the City Palace also reveals that the flooring has the same effect. Artisans polished the lime mortar to give the marble-like effect. Terracotta, brownish-red is like burnt earth. In Hindi it is garoo, even geroo. But when you see pink counter posed against this brownish-red for most of the past century, the difference is, as it should be, noticeable. Much like there is between the blue and green in Didi’s Bhabanipur you see on The Indian Express web edition. What one sees in Jaipur is both, the terracotta and the pink. It is what I had seen in the 1980s and again in five years ago. It is on the exterior side The Jaipur Municipal Corporation takes care of the wall, the residents within their home and shop facades. The latter is voluntary, trying to hang on to the tradition. Yaduendra Sahai, then the curator of the Sawai Mansingh II City Palace Museum and a historian had explained when I interviewed him for Frontline in 1986 unravelled the choice of terracotta. That it was available close to the city being built helped bring them on donkeys. These are best sensed in the palaces where try as you might, the pink would be missing, and also on public buildings, which transformed the city into a harmony achieved by controlling the colour and architecture. Jaipur’s walled city shows you the façade control, much like the buildings skirting Mumbai’s Horniman Circle. Yes, over time, the shades changed on public buildings, probably dependent on the officials’, the contractors’ understanding of what the true shade was used originally. The set of images of the Hawa Mahal, shows the differing shades. It is also perhaps because garooor geroo may not be used. Chemical paints may be the cause. In the 19th century, Ram Singh II tried different colours for different streets, charged the citizens for the costs incurred but soon reverted to garoo. Unimpressed by the result, he switched back to terracotta, in Sahai’s words, to make the residents feel they were members of ‘one community’ despite the castes in them. But how did the ‘pink’ stick to such an extent that one can’t think of Jaipur without adding that colour to it? Again, I revert to Sahai. A British journalist accompanying the Prince and Princess of Wales to Jaipur in 1905 and 1906 mistakenly described it pink by mistake. And that stuck. The pink one most often sees is the shade in which candy floss comes. The fluffy item is enticing because it is a colour that stands alone in a medley of colours. If it were to be universal, the shade could be suffocating, though this can be dismissed as a subjective perspective. True, Rajasthan has a certain bleakness of terrain conferring a hardship outsiders may not easily fathom, and the clothes the women wear and the turbans the men don are the effort to bring some colour to their lives. But that does not make the entire space overpoweringly monochromatic, like Jaipur’s present pink. That’s why Sahai had called the British journalist’s choice of words, “pink city” a “cultural vandalism” which has harmed it. Pink has stuck. Though Jodhpur is occasionally mentioned as the Blue City, no one seems to know the reason why blue is seen. An unverified view is Brahmins painted their places to identify their community. Will blue stick in Kolkata?