Blue Pottery: Persian Glazes, Rajasthani Soul
A Persian tile tradition that travelled from Kashan to Jaipur, almost died in the 1950s, and was rebuilt in a Bani Park workshop by a miniature painter using a dough that had no clay in it at all.
Jaipur Blue Pottery is the only major pottery tradition in India, and one of very few in the world, that uses no clay. Its dough is made from quartz powder, powdered glass, multani mitti (fuller's earth), borax, and katira gum, and can only be shaped in moulds because it cannot be thrown on a wheel. The craft descends from the Persian tile tradition of Kashan (from which the word kashi, meaning tile, comes) and travelled to India through Multan, Sindh, and Delhi before Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh II of Jaipur brought it to Rajasthan in the 1860s. For a few decades it flourished at the royal Sawai Jaisingh Kala Bhavan art school. Then it slowly died. By the 1950s, only one or two old potters in Jaipur still knew the recipe. In the early 1960s, Rajmata Gayatri Devi and Kamladevi Chattopadhyay, the founding chairperson of the All India Handicrafts Board, asked a young Santiniketan-trained Jaipur miniature painter named Kripal Singh Shekhawat (1922 to 2008, Padma Shri 1974) to learn the craft from the last old master and revive it. He did, at his Kripal Kumbh workshop in Bani Park, Jaipur. In 1978, Neerja Chaudhary founded Neerja International, which turned the revived craft into a global luxury export brand. This lesson walks into Kripal Singh's workshop on the morning a crumbling white dough became a blue bowl.
A Workshop in Bani Park
On a summer afternoon in the mid 1960s, in a small workshop in the Bani Park neighbourhood of Jaipur, Kripal Singh Shekhawat stood at a stone slab mixing a white dough the colour of bone. In a row of bowls beside the slab were his five ingredients: powdered quartz, powdered glass, multani mitti (fuller's earth), a spoonful of borax, and a thick plant gum made from katira. No clay. None. He pressed the dough flat with his palm. It was crumbly, not sticky. It broke at the edges when he tried to shape it with his fingers. No potter's wheel in the world could have thrown it.
On the wall above the slab hung two small blue-glazed tiles, each about the size of a cigarette packet. They were almost a hundred years old. They had been brought to him a few months earlier by the Maharani of Jaipur, Rajmata Gayatri Devi, who had placed them in his hand and asked him to find out how they were made. The one old man in the city who still remembered the recipe was nearly eighty. He had taught Kripal Singh the five ingredients, the basic mould shaping, and almost nothing else. The old man's sons had all left the craft for other work.
Kripal Singh was not a potter. He was a miniature painter, trained at Nandalal Bose's Kala Bhavan at Santiniketan and at the Rajasthan School of Art in Jaipur. He had spent his twenties copying Rajput miniatures on paper. Now, in his early forties, he stood in front of a crumbling white dough that was not clay, trying to rebuild a tradition that had almost died in his own city in his own lifetime.
He pressed the dough into a shallow plaster mould shaped like a bowl. Later that afternoon he would paint it with cobalt oxide, coat it in a silica glaze slurry, and fire it in a small wood-fired kiln for an entire night. If the firing went right, the bowl would come out as a piece of Jaipur Blue Pottery: white on the inside, deep blue on the outside, glassy to the touch, waterproof. If the firing went wrong, the dough would collapse back into the five white powders he had started with, and he would begin again tomorrow.