Aurangabad is a small village close to Gorakhpur. It is known across the country for its red pottery craft. While I was at the yoga center I heard that there was clay and a pottery wheel in almost every house and that it was the main source of living for the local residents. One morning I hired a motor-rickshaw for a day and set off on a journey on a small cross-country road winding through colorful colonies and neighborhoods bubbling with life, we passed repair shops for bicycles and scooters, radio and TV sets, small stores for metal kitchen utensils and pots, fabric and clothes, road-side tea stalls decorated with colorful garland-like strings of foil-pouches with spiced chewing tobacco, hanging everywhere. There was a sheet spread out right by the road directly on the ground, with a black umbrella to protect from sunshine or rain tied up to a pole in one corner and a few instruments scrupulously lined up in a straight row in the other, which is called dukan, i.e. a shop. The owner was sitting in the center in the usual squatting position. One was shaving a customer sitting in front of him in the same position, another was repairing shoes, a third one was fixing umbrellas, or sewing clothes on his manual sewing machine. I saw a shop-owner sitting on a couple of bricks cleaning freshly caught fish, which he picked up from a big box on his left side, and after removing what was needed and scaling it, he then dropped it in a bucket full of water, surrounded by three-four grey-white cats on the alert awaiting their share of the business enterprise. The driver of the motor-rickshaw was not in a hurry to reach the village; it was as if he had understood my curiosity in the surrounding picturesque scenery of the neighborhoods around the city.
About half an hour later we made a left turn onto a dusty road with mud houses on one side and a vast crop field, on the other. A group of women bent over the plants were working in the middle and a bunch of kids were running around them. They spotted the motor-rickshaw on the solitary road and headed toward us racing. When they reached the road, they started racing after us, hailing us and asking us where we were going. When we reached the village, we stopped and the kids caught up with us. They surrounded me smiling and asking me all kinds of questions and most importantly kept begging me to take their picture. All this noise and blabber had alerted some villagers that someone was visiting and they had come out of their houses. I distributed among the kids all I had for such occasions in my bag – gum, candies, pens, little torches, key rings and all kinds of knick-knacks. I took several photos of them and in the meantime tried to answer some of their questions and tell them to take me to a potter’s house. I told them I was interested in meeting a woman who was known to be a good potter. The adults standing at a distance shouted a few instructions to the driver and the little ones grabbed both my hands and started pulling me back to the motor-rikshaw.
They followed us running. It was the basti, the neighborhood of the untouchables. Kalpna was a petite and slim woman in a white sari with a line of tiny flowers drawn at the edge in a green color, the same as her blouse. She somehow knew that I was coming to her house and when we showed up on her lane, she was expecting me. She invited me inside and said that she would be happy to demonstrate the production process for me. Kalpna invited me to sit next to her on the floor next to the potter’s wheel, around a concrete platform, which was placed in one corner of the room. She threw a lump of damp kneaded clay in the center on the top, took a wooden stick, placed one end into a little hole in the rim of the wheel and holding it vertically with both hands started pushing it quickly until it was set in spinning motion. Then she pulled the clay outwards and upwards and within several minutes molded a vessel in a beautiful shape. She cut it out skillfully with a string from the rest of the clay at the bottom. Afterwards, she took me upstairs to the unfinished roofless attic, which was nested on top of her only room on the ground level and was connected to it in the back with a narrow wooden ladder. All her products were laid out to dry up here, placed in rows across the room on long flat wooden beams on a bed of hay – there were jars, vases, jugs, all kinds of containers, lamps, toys, statuettes of gods and goddesses, animal masks and decorative wall hangings. She took me to the kiln in her backyard – a pit full of carefully arranged pottery items covered with cow dung patties ready to be fired up. Then she showed me the special yellowish solution, in which all articles were dipped and because of which they would turn bright red during the firing process. Two big wooden boxes with layers of hay and red clay objects were packed near the gate ready to be picked up.
We returned to the house and sat on the only bed in it and chatted a bit while we sipped our tea and had a few biscuits. She was a widow and was 35 years old. She had five children – two girls and three boys. Her oldest daughter was eighteen years old, already married with two little girls and pregnant again. Her son-in-law’s house was just a few yards away and her daughter along with her own kids helped to take care of her younger siblings among whom the youngest was five. She was, actually, standing at the door, with a smile on her face, holding her eight month-old daughter, trying to listen to our conversation, but at the same time keeping an eye on the group of little kids running around her. I could see them when they came close, snatched the baby from her hands, walked back and forth passing her from one to another like a baton and the poor baby’s head wobbled as they jumped and played with her in the dusty lane between the houses. Then they approached the mother, handed her back the baby and giggling peaked inside the house to check what we were doing. A few minutes later they grabbed the baby again and dashed away.
Kalpna was telling me her story. She was happy now when all was in control, but when her husband passed away, she thought her family would not survive. She was alone. Her in-laws had died one after the other shortly after her engagement. She had nothing except this house. Her youngest child was only two months old when her husband died.
“He was not a potter.” She explained that they did not belong to the kumhar jati, the potters’ caste.
“But he was very skilled and could make or fix anything. All the villagers knew him. He was the mechanic for the tractor of the village. He always found small jobs in addition. People called him to repair their bull-cart, or radio or TV set, he helped a few build their house.”
“So, you lived a comfortable life when he was alive?” I asked.
“No. Not at all! You see, he never finished our house. He was out all day. You know, he used to drink a lot. Nothing was left at the end of the day. It was always hard to make the two ends meet. And he would come back home and beat me up. It got so bad a couple of times that my neighbors came to stop him and to save me and the kids.”
“What happened to him?” I inquired further.
“One day he went to bed drunk again. He woke up in the middle of the night in pain, holding his side. He couldn’t get up for a couple of days, stayed in bed moaning and on the third day he suddenly stopped breathing. I was devastated, all alone. Not even a brother-in-law. I couldn’t go to the city to look for a job, because I had small kids, especially the newly born one, who could I leave him with? I could only look for cleaning jobs, I never went to school. But nice people from the village started stopping by, bringing us some food, sometimes corn, vegetables or fruits and even clothes for the kids. Enough to survive a month or two, but then? How long could this go on? I was so worried. People came and offered a cleaning job for my older daughter. However, we knew that there was no future in it for either of us and although I am not a kumhar, they taught me a little bit about pottery. Then, they told me about a traditional crafts center, especially set up to train women. The villagers helped a little bit with the money. My neighbors offered to take care of my older kids and I left with the baby to the residential training center for a month. I learned a little bit of reading and writing, some math and how to work with clay and the wheel. This saved us and changed our lives.”
“Who prepares the clay? Who sells your products? Do you do all this yourself?” I wondered.
“No, no. Everything is organized in a nice system. I have the clay delivered by someone else and another one takes care of collecting and delivering everything to the city. From there it is sent out to many places to be sold. Can you imagine, even to Mumbai!? I have never even been there. But I will go one day. All I need to do is make the clay objects. Some are pre-ordered, others I design and make myself. All of us in the village help each other. If I am sick, someone else takes care of my orders and when they are sick, in turn, I do.”
I asked her whether there was any competition and she didn’t understand my question at first, then I re-formulated my question and she explained to me that there was enough work for everyone and that at times it was even difficult to prepare the production that was needed. Sometimes she would work until late at night to deliver the order. She was happy that she was able to collect enough money for her older daughter’s dowry and she was married to a nice boy and his family was also very kind. They have a younger son and they already decided to get him married to Kalpna’s younger daughter.
“People respect us now. Much more than when I was married. They say I am good at this. I really enjoy what I do. The money is not bad. Some say it will get even better. I had a few visitors from the city to look at my work…who knows what will happen in the future. I taught my girls all I know. They can read and write better than me. They sit and practice. I don’t have time, but I remind them to do it. They are really good at making pots as well. The younger one often wants to help or make her own designs. What an imagination she has. I want them to be able to support themselves if something happens and they are alone. They should not be illiterate, the way I was, and let someone abuse them! Even if they are at home with a nice husband, why not make some money? Men don’t like it, but the money is not bad. My parents were poor and they could not let me go to school, because they needed me to help with the work at home. My children will not be like this. I am planning to send the boys to school. Who knows what will happen next. Maybe they will find a job in the city…”
I looked outside at the kids who were playing. The noise was gradually decreasing. They were starting to calm down, stood longer at the door or sat on the ground right in front of it to listen to us. I looked at my watch. It was 3:30 already. They must be hungry, I figured and I got up to leave, telling Kalpna that I have a meeting later in the city and it was time for me to go back. She was immediately disappointed, however, she jumped from the floor and took my hand, insisting that I stayed for lunch. I knew it was impossible to decline the invitation, without hurting her feelings. Having guests over is an honor for the host and feeding them is a sacred duty, related to an ancient principle atithi devo bhava, or literally ‘let the guest be god’, which means that the guests needs to be treated as a god, described in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (6.2.4) and mentioned perhaps for the first time in the Taittiriya Upanishad (1.11.2)20. It is an old tradition of extending hospitality to anyone that shows up at your door, which entails offering a seat, water, refreshments, food and granting a wish or a gift. There is an old belief that God can turn into a mortal and can come and knock at the door of your house. If you don’t welcome the stranger and carry out the hospitality ritual by offering, if needed, even the last grain you have left at home, then you commit a sin and god can punish you with a curse. Certainly, I accepted Kalpna’s invitation.
I looked around and on her family altar niche saw a few colorful pictures of the gods Ganesha and Lakshmi, decorated with small flower garlands, as well as a statue of the Shiva linga with white flower petals on and around it. It reminded me of an intriguing but less popular legend from the Padma Purana (in the last chapter of its Uttara Kanda), according to which the powerful sage Bhrigu was on a quest to determine who the best of the trinity was, Brahma, Vishnu or Shiva, so he visited Shiva’s abode on top of mount Kailasa. However, the doorkeeper stopped him, because Shiva was engaged in his love with Parvati and had instructed him not to disturb him. Hence, he did not come out to welcome his guest in the prescribed manner. The sage was enraged by this contempt and he cursed Shiva to be worshipped from then on not in his anthropomorphic form, but in the shape of the male organ of desire, linga. Also, the offerings to Shiva were never to be taken back and consumed by the worshippers, which is contrary to the popular practice after the puja ritual performed for the other gods, when the worshippers take some of the offerings blessed by the god and distribute them among their family members. The little statue, usually made of black stone, depicts the linga as a cylinder with an oval top often conjoined at its base with the yoni, symbol of Parvati’s procreative energy – a representation of the creation and the manifestation of life. One of the most famous linga-s is in the Matangeshwara temple, the only temple still open for worship in the Khajuraho complex, built in the 11th century. The linga is eight feet high and about fifty inches diameter made of a single piece of stone as if emerging straight from the earth’s depth. The local people are really proud of their place of devotion and never forget to point out that the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, a fierce defender of the Islamic Laws, was unsuccessful in several attempts to remove and destroy Shiva’s divine icon. The Shiva Purana tells a story about Brahma and Vishnu fighting over who was created first, when a cosmic linga without a beginning and an end appeared in front of them. They tried to reach its end on either side. Brahma flew upwards as a white swan and Vishnu traveled downwards as a white boar, but were unable to find where it started or ended. They realized that this was a supreme divinity to which they prayed for a hundred years. Lord Shiva appeared in his form with five heads and ten hands and proclaimed that the three of them were parts of the same entity21.
Kalpna in the meantime was preparing the food on the clay stove. Her daughter had placed three round metal platters next to her on the floor. One with several small piles of cut up tomatoes, potatoes, carrots and onions, a bunch of coriander leaves and a bowl of lentils. A ball of dough ready to make roti was in the second platter, and in the third one there were seven-eight small metal bowls filled with ground spices – pepper, cumin, coriander, curcuma, cardamom, cinnamon, sesame seeds, clove, etc. She spun the platter with the spices a few times, took a pinch from each bowl and sprinkled the powder in one of the two pots. In less then half an hour she made an excellent lunch – lentils and a vegetable stew.
I sat on the floor along with the little kids who were suddenly so quiet and calm, apparently really hungry. They told me their names and how old they were and asked me about my family, why I came to India without my daughters, where my husband was, where we lived… Kalpna handed a big shiny dark green banana leaf to each of us and served a spoonful of each meal, passed a warm roti to everyone and sat with us. The kids using only their right hand, which is the clean hand for food, put their index finger in the middle of the flat bread, pulled the edge holding it with the thumb and the other fingers, until they tore a piece, then they placed it over the meal and nipped a bite with it niftily. I tried to do the same, as the kids were showing me in slow motion how to snatch the piece with the fingers of my right hand, but I was unsuccessful. Therefore, as I had done it before, I placed all the food over the roti, then made a roll and finished it, while they were laughing at my inexperience and clumsiness.
Before I said good-bye I left a little bit of money. As the motor-rickshaw was driving me away from the village, I was looking at the kids who were running behind us on the dirt-road with bare feet and wearing tittered clothes. I imagined that Kalpna would buy another statue or colorful picture of Shiva or another deity for her altar; she would make an offering, light up the oil lamp and fragrant incense sticks, express gratitude for their mercy and pray to continue protecting her family.
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20 Upanishads. Trans. Patrick Olivelle. Oxford University Press, 2008: 82, 183
21 See for more Doniger, Wendy. Siva the Erotic Ascetic. US: Oxford University Press, 1981.