Terracotta: From Bankura Horses to Temple Facades
Three Centuries of Brick, Clay and Devotion in Bengal, Rajasthan and the South
Meet the Kumbhakar potters of Panchmura whose long-necked horse became the emblem of the All India Handicrafts Board, the Malla kings of Bishnupur whose terracotta temples stand uncracked four centuries later, the Velar villages of Tamil Nadu that still cast life-size guardian horses for Aiyanar, and the Padma Shri masters of Molela who refused to let their plaque tradition die. Learn how a single lump of clay can hold a deity, a temple wall, and a national symbol all at once.
An Office at Connaught Place
In the autumn of 1959, in a high-ceilinged office at Connaught Place in New Delhi, a fifty-six year old woman named Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay sat at a long table covered with sample objects from every corner of India. She had been a freedom fighter, a women's rights leader, and three years earlier she had founded the All India Handicrafts Board, the first government body in independent India tasked with protecting and promoting traditional craft. The Board needed an emblem. Spread across the table in front of her were small terracotta horses, painted Madhubani panels, Bidri inkwells, Channapatna toys, Kashmiri papier-mache boxes, and a hundred other things. She was looking for one object that could speak for the entire craft tradition of independent India.
She picked up a horse. It was the colour of brick. It was long-necked, long-eared, alert, and almost completely abstract. It had come from a village called Panchmura, in Bankura district in southern Bengal, where Kumbhakar potters had been making this exact shape for the snake goddess Manasa for at least three hundred years. Kamaladevi held it up to the light. It was the strangest object on the table. It was also, she could see, the only one that felt like it belonged to no particular century. She set it down in front of her secretary and said it would be the emblem.
Sixty-five years later, the Bankura horse is still the symbol of every government-recognised craft in India. It appears on Crafts Council letterhead, on Tribes India shopfronts, and on the Padma Shri certificates handed to master craftsmen. The choice Kamaladevi made in 1959 turned out to be one of the more consequential decisions in the history of Indian craft policy. To understand why she picked it, and why it deserved to be picked, we have to walk into a Panchmura potter's courtyard, into the temple compound of Bishnupur, and into a few villages much further south.