Earth, water and fire in Khurja

When journalist Rana Siddiqui Zaman set out for pottery town Khurja in Uttar Pradesh for a day, little did she know it would bring out the poet and philosopher in her

The biggest pleasure for journalists is to travel for stories their hearts beat for. Writing on Khurja pottery has been one such journey for me. An orange-and-black dinner set I once bought from Khurja, located in Uttar Pradesh’s Bulandshahr district, brightens my home even to this day. I have wanted to go back to Khurja since, to take in the fragrance of earth and watch a shapeless mound becoming a work of art.

Today, this desire is coming true. I am travelling to Khurja, the legendary pottery town. Khurja is known across the globe for its sheer poetry in clay. It sources clay from Gujarat and Jharkhand, stone from Rajasthan, and colours from across India. And yet it is the biggest cluster of its kind in India.

The story of Khurja is a story of what can happen when inspiration strikes. A British woman visited Khurja around 1914-15 and introduced new pottery skills to the local kumhaars (potters). She left for England
after the Independence but the artisans have kept her legacy alive.

Today, Khurja pottery is prized for its hand-painted motifs, glaze work, and overall quality, and has earned a Geographical Indication (GI) tag. The simple but intricate flowers and vines have beaten Mughal and Moroccan patterns to emerge as signature motifs over time. Kitchenware, vases and garden planters are the most popular products here.

Window shopping

It is July. My trip from Delhi to Khurja is uneventful. Sugarcane fields have dried up and there is nothing for my eyes to feast on. Fields of pink flowers come into the scene as I inch closer to Khurja. And when I reach Khurja, neatly lined shops with glass doors greet me with a good show of ceramic items.

Created with love, painted with the choicest of shades, decorated with mindfulness, hardened by a flame, and yet so brittle. Pottery is like life, I thought. Yes, pottery brings out the poet and philosopher in me.

My thoughts are distracted by colourful pots, kitchenware, planters and decorative items lying unattended outside small shops. Aren’t the shopkeepers afraid someone will pocket small items and sneak away without paying? My lips instantly murmur this Urdu couplet:

Khule rakhte ho darwaze
dareeche baarha tum kyun

Suno duniya tamashon ki
badi shauqeen hoti hai

(Why do you keep windows and doors open like this?/Listen, the world is very fond of spectacle)

Fleeting beauty

My rhythm breaks as I see the elderly Rashid leaning on a mud flower pot and carving a design on it at a forlorn shop. “It’s so beautiful. Don’t you think one day it will go away from you, break, and all your efforts will go to waste?” I ask. Rashid laughs, showing his paan-stained teeth, and says, “If they don’t break, why will people buy new ones? I feel happy when someone takes my labour of love away from me. It means they love it too.”

Jamal Ahmad, a singer and poet I meet later in Khurja, put things in perspective. During Gandhi’s Gram Swaraj times, festivities were designed to uplift the village economy. One such festival was celebrated by families by breaking the earthenware at home so they could buy new ones and support the livelihood of potters and artisans. “This was based on an anti-hoarding thought, implying that life is not about ownership but finding purpose,” Jamal explains.

En route, I spot flower pots up to 3 feet high and even Modha stools, which are traditionally made from bamboo or ropes. It is not easy to drive past these shops without buying some of these lovely articles. I resist the urge. I am in the middle of moving cities.

Factory visit

My research on Khurja pottery had led me to names like S M Khan, an officer on special duty working with former president A P J Abdul Kalam. His father-in-law Rashid Husain Khan was one of the pioneers of Khurja pottery. He set up a factory in 1960. Now his sons Sajid and Majid are in charge. They welcome me inside their factory warmly.

Brothers Sajid and Majid. Their father Rashid Husain Khan was one of the pioneers of Khurja pottery. 

Majid ushers me to a manufacturing unit. He doesn’t allow me to click photographs of the labourers as “they get conscious”. We walk past a lab testing unit, and several experimental designs stacked up in attractive colours. I see as many as 50 people working on pressure casting machines.

I thought Khurja would be a cottage industry, with people working out of homes. I did not expect production facilities sprawling across 24 acres, like the one I am visiting. “Urban India is a big market for porcelain decor items,” Majid says as we pass huge rollers from China and a pug mill from Germany.

The author is given a quick training to paint on unfinished plate. 

On my trip, I also visit Sami Ahmad’s K R Industries. His collection is an impressive mix of Mughal, Moroccan, and new-age geometric designs. The 45-year-old explains the process: “Pottery requires equal amounts of stone and clay. We get clay in lumps while stone comes crushed. Clay, stone and water are ground in a machine for 24 hours until we get a creamy fusion. The machine is fitted with a cloth and blender. The water drains from the cloth into the blender, leaving paste-like clay behind. The drained water flows from the blender into a tank and is then recycled.”

The clay is divided into two parts — jigar, and casting. Jigar is used to make simple but large shapes like something straight or round. A mug or a cup is an example. The clay, reserved for casting, is largely uneven and is fed into the blender again with some solution and dye. Parts like handles are made out of it.

My turn

“Can I try my hand at pottery?” I ask Sami. “No! It requires training and it is no longer done by hand,” he says. But he smiles and offers me a little something to do: “You can paint a plate. This is hand work. Our artisans will teach you.”

I reach a unit where several men and women are making intricate designs on kachcha (unfinished) plates. One needs to handle the plates with care at this stage, they caution me. These plates are polished, glazed and baked in the kiln later. A few of them say if I have ever used watercolours and a brush, then it is going to be easy to paint on the plate. I had but I was bad at it!

After a short training of 20 minutes, the artisans hand me a bowl of colour, a brush, a pencil and a plate. I paint the letters DH but the symmetry looks off. And then, the plate breaks. I had gripped it a bit too tightly. I get another plate. I draw the lettering with a pencil. I erase it multiple times until I am satisfied. Then I paint it in blue and grey colours, just like in the DH logo. Class 5 level, I remark at my work. The artisans clap in encouragement. “It is all right. Unless you spend hours here, you can’t get it right,” one says.

My plate is set aside for fine-tuning and baking. “The process takes 24 hours,” an artisan says. 24 hours! I know I will be counting down the minutes to see the final product.

Backstories

Smaller pottery units in Khurja employ 50-100 labourers while bigger units have 200-250 of them. A skilled worker earns around Rs 40,000 a month while an unskilled worker takes home between Rs 15,000 and Rs 18,000.

I speak to some of them. Sarthak (name changed) is skillfully making flower and creeper motifs on a plate and filling them with blue and pink colours when I approach him. “I was into heavy tobacco chewing as it would curb my hunger. Now Maulanaji (an artisan) taught this work to me. I am paid well. I love drawing too. My mother is also happy. I don’t eat tobacco so much now,” he shares his story.

Flower-and-vine is the signature motif of Khurja pottery.

From owning a pottery unit once to working at another unit now, Ahsaan (name changed) has had quite a life. He says, “Earlier with just Rs 5 lakh, a small potter could establish a business with the use of a coal furnace. My father and I did that. But as gas furnaces came up, small potters like us got wiped out.”

His wife Sakina (name changed) works in the same factory. She is about 21. She enjoys working on pots that
require “soft hands to mould”. Covering her face with a dupatta and smiling coyly, she says, “The work gets me some money. My family is about to grow.” She is six months pregnant.

Owners like Sami are in this for legacy. He calls himself a “modern kumhaar”, who has devoted his life to employing hundreds of artisans and promoting Khurja pottery in domestic and international markets, a business his father Abdur Rahim had started.

Remembering Mrs Baron

S M Khan is a storehouse of knowledge on Khurja pottery. According to him, it is one of the best in the world, artistically speaking. “The intricate designs on flowers and the colouring work are still done manually. Such handwork has no parallel,” he reasons.

While the Mughals and other kings introduced pottery to Khurja, the contribution of one Mrs Baron is remarkable in taking Khurja pottery to new heights.

Sajid shares her story: “She was a pottery expert. She came from Britain when her husband was posted as a district magistrate in Baran, present-day Bulandshahr. Khurja was closeby. Here, she saw potters who used to make pitchers and kitchenware from terracotta by hand. She asked them if they would make the pottery of her choice if she brought them white clay from outside Khurja.”

Khurja has production facilities as big as 24 acres. 

Once the potters agreed, she not only introduced white clay but also the motorised potters’ wheel. Soon she set up a Pottery Development Office, and Baron Khurja Club. The government also encouraged the art. It set up chimney bhattis (kilns) and invited locals to learn how to make new kinds of pottery. It also established a Pottery Centre, which still stands at the centre of Khurja.

“Mrs Baron remains unsung. We wouldn’t have known about her if our father hadn’t told us her story repeatedly to inspire us,” says Sajid.

At one point, Khurja boasted 500 pottery factories and units. Now, the number is down to 200. Of these, only 10-15 are big units. There are many reasons for the slump. Gas furnaces, introduced to control air pollution, call for a huge investment. Unlettered artisans are struggling under the GST regime. Middlemen eat up the profits. The government doesn’t provide subsidy.

Under the ‘One District One Product’ scheme to promote indigenous art, international brands like IKEA and Walmart were to buy 50% pottery for the domestic market from Khurja. The plan was to roll it out by 2023, but there are no signs of it, rue factory owners.

Of life and hope

As I set out for Delhi the next day, Majid gifts me a carton of mangoes that he has got me from his farm. I pass an assortment of clayware on my way out and I am overcome with mixed feelings. Will the art of pottery fade away?

Anju Kumar from Gurugram instils hope in me. She is a self-taught “modern potter” of over 35 years. Unlike Khurja pottery that is famed for its smooth, shiny exterior, her products are grainy and feature abstract patterns.

Excavations have shown that pottery thrived even in the Mohenjo-daro civilisation. “So pottery was there, is there, and will be there as a symbol of human existence on earth,” she says.

The future of pottery is bright, the 60-year-old says. “Initially it was not accepted as an art form but now corporate houses and hotels have started treating it as one. They pride themselves on using Indian pottery to serve food, and also to decorate their spaces,” she says, adding that it is “a candle of hope in the dark, unorganised Indian economy”.

Anju turns philosophical about pottery. I guess we all do. She says, “Ek chota sa pot kitni baatein sikha jata hai. (One small pot teaches so much). For some years, I have been interested in Buddhist philosophy, which encourages monks to design beautiful mandalas with sand and colour them. After one month, they wipe them out, signifying the sacrifice and transience of what we create and try to own.”

I will leave you with another Urdu couplet. This one is by Rahat Indori. I feel the clayware was humming this to me in Khurja.

Main paththron ki tarah
goonga samayeen thaa

Mujhe sunaate rahe log vaqea mera

(I was in the audience,
like a mute stone/People were
narrating my own story to me)

PS: My DH plate arrived by courier a few weeks later.

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Market watch

Notably, 80% of Khurja pottery goes to the domestic market and the rest is exported. “Europe has preserved its love for arts and culture, including its love for earthenware. But it is a small market. Our pottery needs to get a foothold in the US (where people splurge more money on lifestyle),” says Sami Ahmad.

Even for brothers Sajid and Majid Khan, Europe is their biggest market. Putting their local pottery on the global map is a matter of pride for the duo. 

Architects and design students are also driving the pottery business now. The Khurja manufacturers don’t sell their products online. They have tie-ups with vendors, who sell the products to hypermarket chains, decor
stores and furnishing brands across India under their brand name. However, Sami says he is now working on a web storefront.

The price difference is huge between products bought from Khurja and outside of it. A Rs 40 item here will set you back by Rs 100-200 offsite.