Longpi & Black Pottery: Northeast & Manipur Traditions
Two Tangkhul Naga villages in the hills of Ukhrul, a weathered serpentinite outcrop that exists nowhere else in India, a bonfire instead of a kiln, a leaf instead of a glaze, and a six-century-old women's craft that is now appearing in Delhi flagship stores and on Indian food television.
In the Tangkhul Naga village of Longpi Khullen, in the Ukhrul district of Manipur, a master potter named Machihan Sasa kneels on a bamboo mat and kneads a grey-black paste that is half crushed serpentinite rock and half weathered clay. He has no potter's wheel. There has never been a wheel in the village. He has no kiln either. He fires his vessels in an open bonfire in the yard behind his house, and when the pots come out red-hot he rubs them with the fresh leaves of the Pasania (Machilus) tree to seal the signature matt black surface that gives Longpi Hampai its name. The technique runs back through a matrilineal teaching lineage that survived Christian conversion, colonial disruption, and the near-disappearance of every other pre-modern household craft in the Naga hills. In 2023, the Government of India awarded Machihan Sasa the Padma Shri for keeping the craft alive. This lesson walks into his workshop and traces the Longpi story from the hillside of rock above the village, through the bonfire and the leaf, to the Delhi flagship stores and Indian food television shows that now carry Longpi pots into kitchens a thousand miles from Ukhrul.
A Village in the Ukhrul Hills
In the Tangkhul Naga village of Longpi Khullen, in the Ukhrul district of Manipur, high in the hills east of Imphal and close to the Myanmar border, on a bright autumn morning in the late 2010s, Machihan Sasa kneels on a mat of woven bamboo. In front of him is a low wooden stool. On the stool is a lump of grey-black paste that looks almost like wet cement. It is not ordinary clay. It is a mixture of crushed serpentine rock and a specific weathered clay, ground to powder, mixed with water, and kneaded to the consistency of bread dough.
He has no potter's wheel. There is no wheel in the village. There has never been a wheel in the history of Longpi pottery. He shapes the paste between his hands and the flat of a small wooden paddle, turning the piece on a flat wooden disc that sits on the stool. His mother taught him this work when he was a boy. His mother learned it from her mother, who learned it from hers, and so on back through the Tangkhul matrilineal lineage for as far as the village memory runs.
The vessel he is making will be a cooking pot. When it is dry, he will stack it on a layer of firewood in the open yard behind the house, cover it with more wood, and burn the pile in a bonfire for several hours. There is no kiln. There has never been a kiln. At the end of the fire, he will pull the pot out red-hot and rub it with the fresh leaves of the Pasania (also called Machilus) tree. The leaf juice, heated by the pot, leaves a deep matt black polish that looks almost like metal. This is the black of Longpi Hampai, the black pottery of the Tangkhul Naga hills.