Books | Review: The Temple Potters of Puri

The Temple Potters of Puri
By Louise Allison Cort & Purna Chandra Mishra 

Mapin Publishing Pvt, LTD, India, 2013
Hardcover, 491 pages. 301 illustrations. 9 x 11.5 inches

Most religious practices, whether they be performance or the making of sacred objects or images, are aesthetically pleasing. These practices have had centuries upon centuries to be refined, honed, and (conversely) made uniform, as many generations as were packed into those centuries have refined them —if even unwittingly— in order to make the most effective displays of devotion; and their effectiveness is often found in their beauty which, when overpowering, creates a sense of the ecstatic.

The Temple Potters of Puri can be read as an insight into this whole tradition. Since the 11th century Jagannatha Temple has stood in Puri. It is a guiding point for sailors, the center of the town’s economy and the workplace of 300 potters devoted to the needs of its services.

The temple serves as a pilgrimage destination for thousands of Hindi worshippers from throughout India, and so the demands for the Temple’s services never wane. The common practice of the temple is to prepare and distribute sacred food for the Gods, the temple servants and the Gods’ devotees. Not only does this food need to be prepared daily, but it also needs to be served and that is where the temple potters and their sacred duties arise.

There are a variety of ceramics required for the distribution of the sacred food and all of the vessels involved are well defined having been made, day in and day out, for nearly the last 1,000 years and, most often, by families who have inherited the traditions from their direct ancestors.

It is this daily application, this continuing with the same aim again and again, towards the same end, that has made these works (“very large frying pan…serving pots…one-seer…cups…large bowls… small lamps…” and many more”) into the elegant and well-wrought vessels that they are. Creation on this spiritual level, with this daily fervor, is always a work of refinement. There are no attempts to create outwardly, such as we expect from an artist as we think of them, those who must be ever experimenting, asking questions, and trying to express the inexpressible. These potters (and for that matter the temple cooks and the servants who perform the sacred rituals) take the opposite course; they must turn their backs on personal expression, putting effort instead into the form of their duties. These artists are less artists then they are servants.

If their craft has refined over the years, become more sure and, in the process, more elegant, it is merely a happenstance from that greatest of human qualities, to express without any clear prompt or circumstance; I mean, the vessels got better because craftsmen improved in their craft – changing, if very slightly, their form through generations of artisans.

 

But, so far, what I have expressed is thoughts. They are my thoughts as they arose from reading The Temple Potters of Puri which is, as a text, as full and inexhaustible as it could be. It lays out not only the details of the potters, their lives and craft, but of the temple, the history of the land that it inhabits and the various different preparations of the cooks. It is an anthropological work in many respects.

The authors, Louise Allison Cort and Purna Chandra Mishra, have written a work of deep and lasting scholarship that is highly readable. That being said, it is written in a style that we rarely see anymore; it has a graspable flow, is logically laid out and presents points of interest along the way.

Most scholarly texts of today seem to focus almost cruelly on fact, moving from one element to the next without much chatter to charmingly connect the subject matter — this form of writing I attribute to reading online and the predominance of visual information over text — but Temple Potters was begun via research in 1979, before writing had changed. The effect is pleasing, a text that is easy to read, full of trivia (for example, the word “Juggernaut” is derived from the name of the temple Jagannatha) and memorable.

On top of this readability, original source materials from sacred texts, to temple diagrams and images of the potters at work and their vessels complete the book and transform it from something like a text book to another kind of book, one that can be kept out, picked up and picked through like (appropriately enough) a religious text. It opens itself to rereading or, even, brief engagements and touches on subjects and ideas beyond an interest in ceramics, pottery, or Indian anthropology. It’s like a whole season long series on the Discovery Channel and just as enjoyable.

But, the true greatness of this work does lie in the detail given to these potters and their craft. The best sections are the interviews with the potters themselves and those that detail various religious texts through the century that have survived as a record of the potters’ devotion and habits. How the potters go about gathering their clay, shaping their vessels and firing them is preserved in religious poetry, all of which, despite its esoteric nature, is strangely beautiful and intriguing as in this passage instructing the potters to gather their clay in a mango leaf,

“When you finish bathing, still in your dripping garment,
Leaving your hair in disorder,
Go to a place where you know clay is to be found
And collect it, all by yourself.
No one should know where you have gone; no one should see.
…
When the clay is well kneaded, place it on your wheel
And with a pure mind do your puja.”

These instructions are reflective of a meditative act, a secretive and spiritual one. It is easy to see how the potters of Puri have stood as an institution even through these meager lines of verse, they are directed to create ritualistically, clean singly. The creation of their ceramics in every facet is an act of faith, devotion and their oldest ally; habit.

Temple Potters of Puri may not be the coffee table book you want it to be, it isn’t trending and it won’t. The graduate student who engages with it might feel something like envy or jealousy after being given an insight into this deeper passage into their art forever inaccessible to them, while the collector of contemporary ceramics will feel, perhaps, a fascination with what seems akin to a living fossil like the sequoia. But an altogether different reader, a person of a more philosophical nature will take something different entirely from the book; the beauty here is the habit of creating the vessels, its ritualistic demands which arise intensified through the devotion of these potters. They create because they do and can do naught else, or better yet, they create not because of who they are, but what they are.

Ceramics is a demand and the demand creates the temple potter just as it creates the studio potter. They are the same at different levels of awareness.

Christopher J. Johnson is CFile’s Book Critic.

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