Researching Traditional Indian Pottery

In 2023, at the end of my sculpture degree at The Edinburgh College of Art, I was awarded the Royal Scottish Academies Travel Grant Award for my proposal to travel to India to research traditional pottery.

The Kota Tribe

During the research for the proposal that won me the grant I came across a curious tribal community called the Kota Tribe. What intrigued me about these people was their approach to pottery making. They are one of the only remaining communities in India where pottery making is exclusively a female activity. Since the development of studio pottery and the potters wheel, pottery became increasingly a male driven activity. In my proposal I planned out how I might get in contact with the women of the Kota Tribe and learn from them. However, once awarded the grant and putting my plan into action, it began to prove far more difficult to make any contact. I was trying to find anyone connected to them that I could email and find out information as how to reach them. I never recieved even one reply! it was looking hopeless and as each effort proved fruitless I began to come around tot he idea that I wasnt going to be able to meet these women, and started looking into other ways I could make best use of my grant. That was when I discovered Clayfingers Ceramics studio which I will come back to later!

The time came to fly out to India and by this point I had resigned myself to the fact that I wasn’t going to meet the Kota women. Perhaps going to the largest town in the region they exist in might provided some clues. So myself and my travel partner headed off to Ooty, a largish town in the Nilgiri mountains known for its tribal communities and textile production. I knew the Kota Tribe was situated in this general region and thought asking some of the locals about them might provide some answers. No one I spoke to had heard of them! everybody told me they don’t make pottery there, only tea and textiles.

Once again, I had lost hope that I would find them. On our final day in Ooty we had a bit of time to kill and decided we may as well go to the local government museum and learn a bit more about the town. Located up a very steep hill in what looked very much like an old Welsh house, I didn’t have high expectations for the museum. Lo and behold they had a whole exhibition about the local tribes, one of which was the Kota Tribe! They even had examples of their pottery! I wasn’t going crazy! They were real! Had this been the end of the story I would have been satisfied that I found local information about them and seen some of their pottery in person. My travel buddy suggested I ask the museum assistant if he knew any more information about the Kota Tribe. It turned out that he from one of the neighbouring tribes and actually had a contact in the Kota village! So he gave me the contact and arranged for us to visit the village the next day. So we swiftly went back to our hostel to book an extra two nights and a taxi driver for the next day. In our excitement we forgot to ask for the exact location we needed to go to, assuming that google maps would suffice for a village that even locals had never heard of! Rookie mistake!

I search Kota village in google maps and find a place that looks vaguely reminiscent of a tribal village so off we set the next day to what we thought was the Kota Tribe Village. After an hours drive the map leads on to a barely built dirt track heading down into a valley where we get stuck half way as the road is literally being built in front of us. As were sat waiting for the work men to clear the road ahead I get a sinking feeling that we aren’t actually going the right way at all… So I call the number that the museum assistant gave me to try and find out the exact location were trying to find. This contact seems to lose patience with my lack of Tamil language skills and promptly sends me another number to contact. This time I ask our incredibly kind and patient taxi driver if he could try communicating with the new contact I have been given. Through some confused communication we eventually learn that we have infact travelled an hour and a half in the wrong direction! The driver says he can take us there but it will cost us a lot more money as it is very far away. We agree, we can’t have made it this far and give up now! So of we head back the way we came and beyond. This direction makes more sense. We venture further and further into the mountains, surrounded by tea plantations, and only the odd tea pickers dotted amongst the bushes. As we get closer to the location given to us by the unknown phone contact the driver become less sure of exactly where to go. We call the unknown contact again and he speaks to some village men we find along the side of the road. Thus ensues the most chaotic few minutes of the entire ordeal! At this point we have been weaving through the windy teafield roads for over an hour, which doesnt bode well of my travel companion who is now being sick out the side of the car from travel sickness, meanwhile my phone is being passed around random village men at the side of the road who are on the phone to someone I to this day never identified, the driver is listen to the exact directions and I feel as though I’m having an out of body exerience as I watch the whole scene play out. And before we know it my companion has to pull herself together as the driver has decided its time to go and I still don’t have my phone back! I get it back and before long we are pulling up in a tiny hamlet in the most remote place I have ever been to.

We are greeted by two slightly confused looking women who request that we pay them money as we they are taking time out of their day to show us around. Of course we oblige immediately. They lead us down to one of their beautifully painted mud built homes where they give us delicious mint tea and show us some of their pottery. They still seem rather confused as to why we are there and how we even go there. I admit it must be rather unual for two young British women to turn up to their remote hamlet unannounced and with no mutual language to understand our presence. I manage to explain through pictures and body language that I too was a potter and wanted to learn about them and their pottery. As soon as they realised this they opened up hugely and we so enthusiastic to show us everything about their pottery making. From their kiln, the old stone wheel they used to use and the raw clay material that they process in to usable clay. They even give us a demonstration of how they make their pots! It was such an honour to see their process and to have even the smallest glimpse into village life. Surrounded by four generations of women from one family, all involved in making the pots, whilst other villagers came to investigate our presence, and children ran around playing games and making whists from tree branches. Some of the children spoke a bit of english so we had some small converations with them, though they were understandably quite shy to speak to us. The young daughter of the family was even able to provide a bit of translation between my self and her mother and grandmother.

My one wish is that I would have been able to have more in-depth conversations with the women, asking them more in-depth questions about pottery, their perspectives and their approaches to making. However the language barrier made this rather difficult. Despite this, I feel incredible honoured to have been welcomed into their lives for a day and to have learnt so much about how they make pottery and the family community that goes into each piece. The whole experience felt pretty surreal and is a day I will without a doubt remember for the rest of my life. I cannot begin to explain how special it felt to be there, especially considering all the barriers I broke through to get there. There must have been some sort of divine intervention as the chances of getting there seem so unlikely that I still cannot fully fathom how it happened! My romantic side likes to believe my late Gran had something to do with it. She must have pulled some strings up there to get me to the tribe one way or another!

Clayfingers

A few weeks after my day with the women of the Kota Tribe I made the journey to Clayfingers ceramic art studio situated two hours out of Kochi in a setting that I can only describe as my idea of paradise. The grounds of the studio and living spaces are surrounded by tropical trees, vast fields, streams and an array of stunning birds; and at the heart of it all is the large open plan pottery studio. What followed were three of the most intense, emotional, and rewarding weeks of my pottery journey thus far.

Shortly after arriving I was paired up with my tutor Rajesh who attempted to teach me the skill of making traditional Indian cooking pots known as chatti. The first step was to learn how to process the raw clay. the first step on this was to wedge the clay with my feet! Though at first I was unsure about this technique, it makes perfect sense to mix such a vast amount of clay with your feet and legs rather than destroying your arms and wrists trying to do it all by hand. This first step not only mixes the clay but allows you to filter out much of the larger pieces of debris like stones and twigs. Then comes the time to use your hands! In a process that truly felt like a work out every morning the clay must again be wedged in the traditional method of mushing the clay gradually in layers so that each section becomes amalgamated with one another. After this stage there is yet another wedging stage of twisting and slapping the clay together to give it one final mix. then comes time to throw!

throwing in a way I have never seen before