DEEPER THAN INDIGO

Deeper than Indigo is two stories. Primarily it's the story of Thomas Machell, an indigo planter (among other things), who kicked around India (among other places) between1824 and 1862. Secondarily, it's the story of Jenny Balfour Paul, the author and an expert on indigo, who is still very much with us. The particular interest for members of the Scientific and Medical Network, and the reason for this review, is the connection between Thomas and Jenny, and specifically whether their connection goes beyond the usual and natural connection between a researcher and her subject.

Thomas Machell was nothing if not restless. At 12, he climbed out of the bedroom window of his family house in Beverley, Yorkshire, with his younger brother in tow, and made it as far as Brighton. At 16, he worked his passage out to India and then to China where he played a minor part in the First Opium War, witnessing the signing of the Treaty of Nanking. From there he sailed around Cape Horn on a ship carrying coal to the Marquesas Islands in the South Seas, where he fell in love with the daughter of a Chief. Happiness seemed, for the only time in his life, a possibility but he chose instead to live an unsettled, unusual and lonely life working indigo in Bengal, coffee in Kerala and bullock transport in the interior, as well as travelling solo up the Indus to the Northwest Frontier and joining – as the only foreigner – Arab merchants taking cargo by dhow from Calcutta to Suez.

Machell, an observer and outsider, watched the Raj as if from a distance, as if part of it, but not part of it. He didn't regard it as a blessing. He didn't take the view, which was in part at least engendered by the Enlightenment, that western culture was inherently superior. In his opinion, 'The white man is not the regenerator but the annihilator of the uncivilized races, he brings no blessings to the savage.' He was sympathetic to the natives. He became fluent in Arabic, Hindi and Bengali and often dressed as the locals dressed, all of which makes him sympathetic to modern eyes and something of a throwback to the earlier days of the East India Company when a degree of assimilation was not considered exceptional.

Jenny Balfour Paul came across Machell through his writings in the British Library and fell for him. She begins the book; 'I first met Thomas at the very end of the 20th century. The attraction was instant, and when I parted from him in London, I felt physically sick.' When she visited his family home in 2000, she wrote, 'As I began to walk slowly up the drive this morning, I felt strangely choked up. The house was still hidden behind trees. Then suddenly I glimpsed it through a gap in the trees and, absolutely unexpectedly, the very moment I saw it I was engulfed by such an overwhelming depth of feeling that I found myself sobbing uncontrollably. It's hard to describe but the emotion seemed to come from somewhere else, as if my reaction on seeing that house – almost 'returning' to it – wasn't mine. It was much more than a sensation of sadness, it was an overpowering sense of loss such as I have never experienced in my own lifetime.' When she saw the façade of the house for the first time, 'I pointed to the upper right-hand window and out of my mouth came the words, "That was Thomas's bedroom – he climbed out of that window when he ran away."'

There is much more of this 'remembering' throughout the book. Balfour Paul follows Machell through thick and thin and her adventures, both before and after discovering the journals, – getting herself smuggled into Oman, being shot at in Yemen, travelling beyond where few researchers would dare to go – are an absorbing read in their own right. Coincidences between her life and Machell's abound. She undertakes a past-life regression in which Machell talks to her and she to him, a conversation that continues even when she's not lying in a dark room at the back of a tea-planter's house in India's Malabar Hills where her regression sessions take place. She fills in missing parts of his chronicles with her own intuition, parts of which are subsequently confirmed by her own research. And so the book winds and weaves between the two of them as they share history, travels, anecdotes and past experience.

Does this all add up to evidence of a reincarnated spirit? Balfour Paul herself plays this down but the connection between the two of them centuries apart – whatever may be the precise nature of that connection – is real enough. It's a rollicking read and, for those who like their intimations of immortality off the beaten track, not to be missed.