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The 33-year-old is the scion of KMA Exports, an indigo farming and production company that has operated here since the 1960s.Balachander’s great-grandfather started processing indigo during colonial times – when the naturally sourced dye was a valuable commodity. The foreman says a two-minute prayer for Neel Atha (or the Blue Mother) – the sacred name the villagers have for indigo – and presents an offering of bananas and coconut, blessed fruits according to Hindu rituals.“It is almost a festival for our village,” says Balachander Anbhazhagan. We are adding new stories, translations.Before work can begin, labourers and onlookers gather around the century-old tanks for a simple pooja, or prayer, invoking divine blessings. But October finally brought the first day of “thotti podurathu” – when the traditional tanks are set up to extract the dye from the Indigofera plants.The collection includes retold traditional tales and new short stories in the languages most spoken by UK children.

Out in the fields, the female farmers smile at the presence of strangers, while the men seem to acknowledge the visitors less.In minutes, sickles swinging deftly, the men and women harvest the lush Indigofera plants that have grown about 10cm (four inches) high. Then, the leaves have to reach the first tank within three hours in order to yield the best quality indigo, Balachander says.A five-minute drive away from the extraction unit – past simple concrete village houses and a group of children playing cricket in a coconut grove – is an inconspicuous indigo farm where the leaves are ready for harvest. A farmer with his bounty of Indigofera leaves before they are sold and processed Indigofera plants, which look a bit like basil, must be harvested just before their pink flowers bloom. After the fermentation, the leaves are removed, and the water is drained into another massive tank where the solution oxidises and sediment settles at the bottom of the tank finally, the sediment powder is dried and packed into cakes.

The top slot of the tank is then opened up, letting out water that will be used to irrigate nearby farms. In an hour’s time, the greenish liquid turns into a brilliant blue. “Now, I had repurposed a machine used in aquaculture to mechanise this process.”For 45 minutes, the pedalling machine moves the water around, kicking up a foamy layer. After that, to help the indigo particles settle as sediment at the bottom of the lower tank, the water has to be aerated, a process that used to be far more picturesque.“Just few years back, four labourers would stand in the tank and create turbulence in the water by kicking it for two hours,” says Balachander, explaining the old process of aeration. Labourers unload spent indigo sheaves for composting With the pooja complete, the foreman opens a hole in the upper tank and the water gushes into the tank below it.

He is also known for pressing the boiled indigo sediment into perfectly-shaped cakes.“As a child, I remember my father working in this very unit. An ancient craftWith a twinkle in his eye, 48-year-old Pachaiyappan holds out his indigo-coloured palms, stained with the remains of another day spent turning Indigofera plants into blocks of dye.For five months every year, for the last 20 years, the farm labourer has travelled from the outskirts of Kongrapattu to the Anbhazhagan’s estate to do this work.“This colour will remain in my hand for a week,” he says, “but till date, this work has had no negative impact on my health as everything is natural.” Pachaiappan showing his indigo-stained hands Pachaiyappan is so adept at the work that he can gauge when to stop the oxidation process by merely looking at the colour of the water. The cakes are dried for five days before they are ready to be used as dye. This is then boiled in a brick kiln, filtered, and pressed and formed into small indigo cakes.

The most important thing for him is maintaining the original quality of the dye.“We can’t afford even a speck of dirt in our indigo cakes,” he reminds his team as they go about their work. We don’t even have to beat the water any more (to oxidise it),” Pachaiyappan says.Balachander says the manufacturing process has largely remained the same through the generations, with the exception of some improved mechanisation to ease things for the labourers. Now, things aren’t complicated. He used to sing a song while walking up and down a 20-foot pole even as another helper filled the water in a pail, which was then used to fill the tanks.

It amounts to nearly 2,500 acres (1,011 hectares) in indigo production. Each tank could hold easily up to two tonnes of indigo plants and yields nearly 3–5kgs of indigo powder.”While the family now owns about 30 acres (12 hectares) of land, they also have contracts with other indigo farmers in hundreds of villages across Tamil Nadu, allowing them to harvest more plants. “This tripled our profits and by the early ‘90s, we expanded it to four tanks – two for extraction and two for sedimentation. The more I read about indigo’s history and learned of its eco-friendly nature, the more I was hooked.”It came as a huge relief for his father, farmer-businessman M Anbhazhagan, 63, who was eager to pass on the secrets of the craft to the next generation.Remembering the day he himself joined the business in 1982, Anbhazhagan says: “My father had received only 10 cents (4,356 square feet) of land from my grandfather for indigo farming and he had just two tanks for indigo production: an extraction tank where the harvested plants were seeped overnight and a sedimentation tank where the fermented water was oxidised manually by men (by kicking the greenish-blue water).”Anbhazhagan looks through pictures of his parents smiling behind a younger version of him and tells us that it is their blessings that helped him grow an indigo empire in his small village.When he took over the business, Anbhazhagan chose to sell directly to the artisans instead of selling it to agents. “But while pursuing my MBA in the United States, I had the opportunity of studying the supply chain management of our indigo production. But it was not always part of his plan.“I did not plan on taking up my father’s business,” he tells Al Jazeera.

“Indigo is one of the main cash crops here and has helped farmers earn a decent living due to the thriving export dyeing business,” says Anbhazhagan. “It works as a great nitrogen fixer for the soil,“ he explains.Indigo has also helped the surrounding community. The older Anbhazhagan recalls that back in the day, the leftover indigo leaves were the only fertiliser his father used for his other crops like millets or paddy.