Indian Yellow: Was It Really Made From Cow Urine?

In 1883 T. N. Mukharji went to Monghyr, in Bihar, to see how the pigment, called piuri, was made, and described it in a short letter published by the Society of Arts in London.¹

He described milkmen living at Mirzapur, on the edge of the town, who fed their cows “solely with mango leaves and water.” The urine was collected through the day in small earthen pots, heated in the evening until the yellow settled, and the sediment was shaped into balls, dried over charcoal and then in the sun.¹

A single eyewitness letter is thin evidence, and the story was long hard to check. Could a paint really come from mango leaves and urine?

In 2018, the conservation scientist Rebecca Ploeger of SUNY Buffalo State and her colleagues announced new evidence supporting that extraordinary 19th-century eyewitness account. Their key clue was hippuric acid, a substance associated with urine, found in samples of the pigment.²

“The hippuric acid discovery supports the original nineteenth-century accounts that urine is used in the process of making Indian Yellow,” Ploeger said. The results were published in the journal Dyes and Pigments.²

So the answer to our question is: the evidence supports the story. What it cannot tell us is how widespread the practice was, or how the cows really fared.