Khurja, Chinhat & Khanapur: The Ceramics Corridor
Three Potter Towns, One Kumhar Community, and a Kiln That Knows How to Wait
Meet the Khurja potters of Bulandshahr who absorbed Persian glaze chemistry from Timur's army and Multani refugee families after Partition, the Chinhat stoneware workshop near Lucknow that taught Indian village potters to fire above 1,200 degrees, and the Khanapur Kumbhar community of Karnataka whose red earthenware water jars still outperform steel in the hot months. Learn how India's three-layered ceramics corridor works, and meet the master who made it a fine art.
Khurja, November 1947
A cold November morning in Khurja, 1947. In the potters' lane off the Delhi road, a master kiln-operator sits on his haunches in front of a brick downdraft kiln that has gone cold for the third day in a row. Call him Raghunath Prajapat, a composite figure drawn from the working lives of Khurja's Kumhar potter families in the months after Partition. The coal ration is late. The December firing of glazed tableware is almost due. This morning a new family has arrived at his door. They have crossed the new border at Lahore and travelled east for three weeks. The father, a potter from Multan, carries a bundle of river-bed clay samples wrapped in a cotton cloth, and a single glaze recipe written in Persian on a scrap of paper. He does not yet know if Raghunath can teach him how the Khurja kilns work. Raghunath does not yet know if he can feed both households through the winter.
Forty years later, Khurja will supply more than seventy per cent of the household ceramics used in Indian homes, and the Multani glaze recipes brought to this lane by refugee families will be indistinguishable from the ones that had been in Khurja since Timur's army passed through in 1398. This lesson is about how that happened, and about two other towns, Chinhat near Lucknow and Khanapur in north Karnataka, that tell the same story in different ways.
What ceramics actually are
Ceramics is the art of turning earth into rock by fire. Soft clay, dug from a riverbed or a field, is shaped on a potter's wheel or pressed into a mould, dried in the sun, and then fired in a kiln at temperatures between 700 and 1,300 degrees Celsius. At the lower end of that range, the clay fuses into earthenware, a porous, soft, red-orange material that is still slightly permeable to water. This is the clay of matkas, diyas and the traditional kulhad tea cup. At the higher end, above about 1,200 degrees, the clay particles vitrify into a glass matrix, producing stoneware: dense, heavy, waterproof, capable of holding boiling tea without leaking. Above that lies porcelain, fired at over 1,300 degrees and made from a special white kaolin clay.