Potters’ tales

Auroville Today: Why did you come to Auroville, Roy? 

Roy: Everybody has an incredible story, otherwise they wouldn’t be here.

I had an experience where I went into a non-mental state where the aspect of the mind that makes comments stopped.

I had the experience of a consciousness observing; it was like I was in contact with the purusha for a moment. I decided at some point then that I wanted to practice yoga to find out what this was.

I found a yoga teacher who knew about Sri Aurobindo and The Mother and then I decided to join a spiritual community to continue my practice. I went to a bookshop in Harvard Square and picked up a book called Modern Utopias. On the cover was the Lama Foundation and on the back was a picture of the Galaxy. So I went off to the Lama Foundation community in New Mexico where I met Ram Dass, among others, and also someone who had been to Pondicherry and visited the Ashram. While he was telling me about it, I suddenly had this vision of an ugly green building with green shutters. I had no idea what that was.

One day I was in a bookstore in New York and saw an advertisement for a ticket to India for $350. I thought I’d check it out. I went to the travel agency, and said I wanted to go to Pondy. And the woman said ‘I’ve been there, it’s great’.  She told me that with this ticket I would have to leave in three days.

But I had no visa for India, so the next day I went to the Indian consulate to get one. They didn’t want to give it; in fact they tried to dissuade me, asking “But why do you want to go there?” But finally I got it. I left on February 28th, 1971, leaving a chit for my parents saying, ‘I’m going to India’. 

When I reached Pondicherry, I recognised the big green building with the shutters. And I met the Mother. Originally I wanted to stay in the Ashram, that’s why I came, but Navajata said I had to go to Auroville. 

I went on a village bus to Kottakarai. When I arrived in the Silence community, the sun was blazing, there were no trees, and a big woman in a sari was screaming at a taxi driver. There I met Constance, Iris, Jocelyn, Daniel, Jaap, Diane and others who were creating this community near Kottakarai village.  

Auroville in those days was like a train that was moving fast, and I felt it existed like a couple of milliseconds in the future, which made it invisible to the rest of the world. Yet it was so real, this thing that was manifesting. It was so compelling that nobody dreamed of leaving. 

You had the first pottery in Auroville?

Roy: Constance and I started Auroville’s first post-Neolithic pottery. I’d read A Potter’s Book by Bernard Leach, on the artisan traditions handed down by Koreans and Japanese from the greatest period of Chinese ceramics in the Sung dynasty, which got me interested in pottery. Constance who had been living in Kottakarai village had noticed that plastic buckets and kujas were beginning to show up in the local villages, and he foresaw that the village potters would disappear unless they could start producing more durable products. So, our idea was to hire a village potter and teach him how to do glazing. As it turns out the village potters are quite independent and would not be convinced to join our project. In the end, that idea didn’t work out but we decided to start a pottery, anyway. 

At that time, I had asked my father for some money to a house. Constance convinced me to build a pottery instead and then the pottery would build my house. Meanwhile we tried to get additional funds first from the Tamil Fund for Rural Development. This didn’t work out either, but we did manage to get a grant from a Canadian fund to get us started. 

Neither I nor Constance knew anything about practical pottery, although Constance had been a ceramics enthusiast since 1964. 

As Golden Bridge Pottery was already there, I started going to Pondy to take lessons from Ray and Deborah.  Constance also went occasionally. At that time, they were not producing anything, merely doing thousands of tests with tiles to find the glazes that worked in India. Learning how to create glazes is quite a challenge and I focused mostly on learning how to throw a pot.

As a result, Constance and I decided we were going to do salt glazing because it was the easiest thing to do. We built the first kiln, a small two-chamber affair, in a canyon, which maybe wasn’t the best location for a kiln. The first ceramics were primarily hand-built – though we also had a low village-type wheel that one had to squat at. We didn’t really know what we were doing. In the first firing in 1974, every pot melted: all we had were these ugly green blobs. It was a total disaster. Later Iris, Constance’s partner, became quite adept on the wheel, and one of the more successful products of the pottery was a large quantity of different types of beads that were used in jewellery and various creations by Fraternity and others.

Our first pottery building was a basic frame with a tile roof – no walls, no floor. The final pottery was completed in 1976. I designed the all-wood building, inspired by a book on Japanese tea houses, and built it with Daniel, who had studied architecture with Christopher Alexander. Constance added the experimental bamboo-clay-and-fibreglass panels in the wooden framing at the front of the building and made a beautiful teak potter’s wheel, which is still in use. 

At a certain point, my father sent me another cheque so we could continue. I went to Pondy to cash it and put all this money in a leather bag. Then I went to the bazaar to buy some fruit. In the middle of the bazaar was a totally naked fakir with a large knife through his mouth. Naturally he came right over to me and stood in front of me, and, for an instant I went unconscious.  When I came to, the zipper was open, the money was gone, and the sadhu was nowhere to be seen! The next morning, I went to the bazaar looking for the fakir, it was totally empty except for one black cow with a red dot on its forehead which as it walked past me poked me in the arse, so I took that as a message. 

That delayed everything for a long time.

We had a few more firings, but the pottery only took off when Patrick and Angad turned up. Angad had been trained at Golden Bridge while Patrick Adamson had studied with Michael Cardew, one of the foremost British potters. 

Patrick took one look at the pots I had made and tossed them all in the water. Then he sat down at the wheel and within 20 minutes made a hundred or so perfect pots. 

Constance had already left by then, and I left soon after to work at Matrimandir. 

Angad: I had decided to move to Auroville in late 1978 and used to come and work on getting the pottery building finished on Sundays. The keet had been replaced by tiles but the work hadn’t been completed and it leaked and needed urgent finishing. Patrick came and helped me finish the arch of the caternary kiln I had started building for salt firings. In May, 1981 we fired this kiln for the first time. I continued working there until 1990, making salt glazed wood fired stoneware, then I set up Shilkipa with Michael Hutin. I established Mantra Pottery, where I still work, in April 1994. Over subsequent years, many smaller pottery studios sprang up, both in Auroville and the villages. Most of the Aurovilian potters were trained at Golden Bridge, whose influence has been immense. It’s why someone described the Pondicherry area as the ‘kashi’ of ceramics in India.   

How did you arrive there?

Angad: It’s an interesting story. When I was studying at Oxford University in 1973, a group of us would go to a friend’s house to watch a regular BBC 2 series on crafts. Crafts interested us because none of us wanted to work in the corporate world. One night there was this film about a Japanese potter, Hamada Shoji, and it blew my mind. I remember saying, ‘I could live like this’. 

Anyway, in between crazy things happened. I tried to get into filmmaking in the UK. That fell apart, but when I came back to India I thought I’d write a script for a film. I came to Pondicherry because I thought I could use the library and stay quietly writing, but once here I heard there were interesting potters around. 

I went to Golden Bridge and met Deborah and Ray. I noticed the studio reminded me very strongly of the film on Hamada but I couldn’t remember his name except that he was short, stout, bespectacled and bald. They showed me a book about a Japanese potter, 

I opened it and saw it was the same guy who I had seen on the BBC. Apparently Deborah, who knew Japanese, had gone to Japan as an interpreter for the writer who was researching Hamada, and now Ray had built her pottery wheel space to look like Hamada’s. 

Within a couple of hours, I asked if I could learn. Some days later, Ray met me on the beachfront and said if you want, you can come. 

I spent 3 ½ years there. Michel came about six months before I left, and many other Auroville potters have learned there since. 

Actually, I had come to Pondy earlier with my mother, who wanted to come to the Ashram. When I asked her who the guru was, and she told me it was a French woman, my first reaction was ‘Mum, you’ve lost it.’ I thought it was just another of those scam gurus. 

Anyway, we came here in September, 1971, and I was overwhelmed by the atmosphere. I had darshan with The Mother, and within three or four days I got a scholarship to Oxford: if I hadn’t got that I probably would not have gone to the UK, not have seen that programme, not have met Deborah and Ray etc. It was a series of so-called coincidences, but I know in hindsight it was all arranged, including the fact that I’m still here. If I look back, I can’t blame anybody but the Mother for all this! 

Adil, you also learned at Golden Bridge. What brought you there? 

Adil: I came in 1996 to get an application form from Ray for a colleague in Bombay. She had Ashram connections and wanted to come and learn pottery. I got the form and went back to Bombay and my life as an architect. The friend did not fill up the form for a year, so I said if you don’t fill it up, I will fill it up, just to bug her. She wasn’t interested any more. So I filled it up and posted it to Ray. I got a succinct reply.  ‘Course starts the first Monday of March. Be there!’ I was! 

During 1998 and 1999, I had an architecture project in Bangalore from my Bombay office. So I used to travel to Bangalore to meet my staff every fortnight, and in between study ceramics in Golden Bridge Pottery, where I stayed for 2 ½ years.

When I came to Auroville I worked with Angad for three months, and later at five or six different Auroville pottery studios. One of those was Mandala pottery where I later worked part-time, spending the other half teaching arts and crafts at Transition School for 2 1/2 years. 

My Entry Group experience was very funny. At my interview, Nolly asked me what I wanted to do here and I said ‘pottery’. She said, ‘No, we want you to do town planning’, as she knew that I had a Masters in Urban Design from the U.S.  I smiled and said, ‘You can’t force me to do this’. Then she said, ‘Ok, you can do pottery, but you have to make tiles for everybody’s house in Auroville. We are building a lot of homes in Auroville these days’. I said, ‘What?!’ Then they relaxed and started laughing.

One of the things people ask me is why I stopped architecture. Sadly, I can’t pretend there was any sudden flash of light that made me stop architecture. It was a very smooth transition, there was no, ‘this is my real calling’ moment. I just felt I couldn’t go back to my old life. After a couple of years, Anamika and Chinmayi offered to have me become a co-executive at Mandala, and I’ve been there since. 

I guess I didn’t come here for The Mother and Sri Aurobindo.  

I came for clay, but along the way everything else rubbed off on me, happily! I was gifted Savitri on my birthday in 1998 and that has left an indelible impression; I am often scribbling quotations from it on my clay-work and paintings.

Over the years, the Auroville potteries have helped village potters.

Angad: We trained a lot of village potters. When somebody asks me what the purpose of the pottery is, I say it is to teach local people a respectable craft. The recruiting field in my pottery was kids who failed 10th standard, whose parents had no more money to educate them, and who didn’t want to become mason helpers and stand in the sun all day being yelled at. I’ve trained a lot of them and now they make a decent living.  It’s one of the things I’m proud of. Our pottery is not making a lot of money but that was never the intention. 

But still, if we in Auroville didn’t charge what we do, if we lowered our prices by 20%, the village potters could not afford to work. So when people complain about our pricing, we’ve actually left them space to exist, and I think that is very good.

But isn’t there an issue with village potters copying Auroville pottery' designs? 

Adil: Yes. People come to the Visitors Center boutiques, buy one piece, then take it to a village potter to make multiple copies for much less, never mind quality control. This has been happening for the last 10 or 15 years. Things that are standard are copied blatantly. 

Angad: But it’s not just outside entrepreneurs who are the problem. I had an issue with an Aurovilian manager who liked a diffuser that we made. He told me he wanted to buy the design so I couldn’t sell the diffuser anywhere else. I refused, saying that if he bought everything we made he would have exclusivity anyway. So he said he didn’t want it that way and, anyway, it would be out of fashion in two years. Thirty years later, it continues to sell very well!

So what is the solution to the copying problem?

Adil: There comes a point when you say nothing is original really, and move on. We at Mandala keep ahead of the pack with new looks and designs all the time. Also, nobody copies our murals and sculptural work because there’s no big market for that.

All of you have lived here for a considerable number of years. How do you view the Auroville situation today?

Gillian: It used to be a very sweet community and people were benevolent and full of goodwill, but now on the road it’s ‘get out of my way’. There’s so much aggression. 

Angad: That’s the transition from tamas to rajas, which mirrors what is happening in India as a whole. When we came to Auroville, India was tamasic, but now it’s very different. It’s not pleasant but it’s a progression which, at some point, will also have to be transcended.

Adil: At the moment, people are divided into different camps. You can’t go anywhere without sensing that, and you can’t talk with somebody without looking over your shoulder to see who’s listening to you. Even if you are only discussing the weather!

Angad: Kids younger than my son used to greet me, but now they don’t. That hurts the most. 

Is this new or does it feel like a repetition of an earlier period of Auroville’s history?

Roy: Certain things don’t really change. For example, the ‘quotation wars’ have always been here. One of my favourite quotes of the Mother is that everything is as it should be at every moment; and Auroville is for those who think the world isn’t as it should be. For me, that’s the essence of it. It’s all contradictions and each day She had a different vision.   

Angad: When the IAC members came in 1995, there was a chance that they would underwrite an appeal to the government to buy the land, but in our open meeting with them the only issue that was flogged and flogged was the visa one and no other topic could be aired.  We were so obsessed with our own problems that we never asked for their advice and help. We were only interested in ‘us’, not the larger picture.  Over the years, things don’t seem to have changed very much. Many people talk about the hardships they overcame to plant trees and create spaces in Auroville, but nobody says we were here by Mother’s Grace, and through all the difficulties that Grace was working to help us. There was so much Grace then and now: people got sick and they were looked after in the Ashram nursing home, money always came from somewhere, but nobody acknowledges this. That failure is what is stinging everybody now, because the day you start acknowledging it, that it’s not ‘our’ work but we were merely instruments, then it’s easy to accept that progress is continuing.

At the same time, the narrative that says that nothing was done here for 50 years by the Aurovilians is also wrong.

Gillian: I never felt the need to shout about what we had done from the rooftops, or to analyse what we have done. If people stopped using their minds so much it would be a much simpler journey. Why does everything have to be analysed to death?

Angad: Exactly. If we were using our rationality none of us would be here. I didn’t come for any rational cause.  After all, I moved to a place where I couldn’t even own the pottery. 

Adil:  People don’t understand how our Auroville is set up. When I’m travelling, the first thing that people ask about is our financial setup. Nobody understands the fact that I only get a maintenance allowance for all we sell. Not many understand what a grace it is to be here, doing what you love, in a community that nurtures and supports you.

Clearly, this is why you are still here. But what about the others? What keeps you here?

Roy: I came because I read in Letters on Yoga that if you want this transformation, one must be close to the Mother. Of course, that was written in 1936 to someone else, but that is why I came to India, for what Sri Aurobindo calls, “Triple Transformation”. All of us thought the same. But this is transformation; it’s going as fast as it can, given the conditions.

Gillian: I didn’t have any formation at all about how quickly the transformation would take. I came in off the road and didn’t particularly believe anything. You just live the thing, and you grow through that. And the experience has been so rich. Picking up garbage in the local village can be interesting, even inspiring, but people don’t see that. They feel sorry for me when they see me engaged in that. But I say I’m more than OK because Mother’s with me, I feel her support is always there. And each person here has their own path to that.

So we are blessed. We could have lived a very boring life elsewhere that would have taken us nowhere. 

Angad: Every day when I wake up I think how great it is to be here. Even though there are all these strange trips going on at present, nothing will make me change my mind. I have always been absolutely convinced The Mother is completely in charge of Auroville, which is why we should give thanks that we are here. And the more I do this, the better life is.