Hands On
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PREMA MANMADHAN meets the man who gave up promising prospects to rescue pottery in remote Aruvacode

What's an NIDwallah (National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad) with a degree in mechanical engineering to boot doing in remote Aruvacode, Kerala, when he should be minting the moolah in hep Delhi or glitzy Mumbai? K. P. Jinan, 40 something, is ‘dirtying’ his hands with clay helping the villagers create things of beauty or utility and market them. ‘‘I don’t interfere in their style. It is an interactive process,’’ he says to confound you further.

Kumbhom, the organisation Jinan had formed, has transformed their lives, say Aruvacode folks. From penury, shame and despair, they have metamorphosed into confident men and women, eking out a decent living from the only profession they know — pottery.

Aruvacode is indeed a model for well-meaning fledgling NGOs. Ten years ago, a host of them had descended on the village to ‘rescue’ it from the bad days it had fallen into, even though it had the best potters in the entire area. Camps were conducted and several organisations vied with one another in full media glare to help the villagers realise their potential.

When the initial excitement ebbed and the scribes moved on to greener pastures, they all left, one by one. But Jinan stayed on.

He had, with Jaya Jaitley, (presently Samata Party chief and formerly with Dastakar) also landed at Aruvacode in the early 1990s with the others. They realised after some time that the potters found no buyers for their traditional ware. They were thus forced to move on to more paying but demeaning work. Their craft, and of course self respect, had to be saved and in the process their morale too lifted.

Jaitley organised the women and Jinan, with his panache for original designs, started a nouveau movement, involving the men, women and children of Aruvacode. ‘‘It isn’t infra dig to potter around with clay and make a living off it, I told the children who thought that their parents’ profession was ‘low grade’,’’ says Jinan, now eight years into the challenge.

The exhibition mode of marketing ware didn’t exactly prove money-wise. The terracotta they shaped ranged from ordinary pots to vases, huge garden lamps, pots and birdbath et al. But one success was often followed by two mega disasters. The men and women apparently didn’t assume Jinan could be a silver lining in their lives and they deserted him and the new life, one by one.

The experiment having failed, Jinan didn’t despair. He shifted gear. With a loan from his father, he put all his architectural instincts to practical imaginative use in terracotta and the concept ‘terracotta in architecture’ was given a new twist.
Terracotta in architecture? Yes. Designer tiles. He let the women and children dabble in clay and unobtrusively helped them shape their imaginations into fancy tiles. These designer tiles found a bankable market in uppity circles. Jinan added terracotta wall hangings with murals, dinner sets, ashtrays, candle stands and sundry other items to the collection. The firing technique employed (Jinan specialised in ceramics at NID) together with the expertise of the traditional potters created a perfection that was ‘five-star’ material.

‘‘This was what I was working towards,’’ says a contented Jinan. Eco-friendly, earthy cool and healthy. Environment conscious new generation architects embraced this concept and now keep the Aruvacode potter fraternity busy. Better housing, fewer school dropouts and a new respectability have crept into their very psyche. All this gladdens Jinan the bachelor who lives in a small rented house in the village, sans electricity, TV or other mod essentials.

‘‘Success has come but after eight years of toil, doubts and heartache,’’ Jinan concedes.

Isn’t managing an unlettered group of artisans and the unpredictability of marketing taxing? Why, Jinan could well have ventured into the designer crowd, mingled with the jetsetting partying elite, given his background.

‘‘It wasn’t what I was looking for in life,’’ Jinan puts it simply. Formal education and its overemphasis on rules sicken him. ‘‘It kills imagination and initiative,’’ he laments. Jinan has this interesting example to prove it: He asked eighth standard students in a school to draw a circle, using a ruler. They all laughed. He asked the same thing to smaller children who had just begun school and they drew a circle, using a ruler as the radius of the circle, on the sand.

The ability to think ands do something innovative is stymied with too many rules and regulations in a ‘propah’ school, Jinan feels. In the modern art world too, it is forced creativity rather than spontaneous unravelling of the mind, Jinan broods. He has evolved a de-schooling process which can help people recover that ability to think, independent of what is expected of them and what the so-called rules say, to regain that ‘lost innocence’ in life.

Long years of travel, deep into the North-East and living with tribals, have sharpened his sensibilities and his belief that ethnicity and all that is traditional have to be preserved on the tribals’ own terms, not according to the whims and fancies of urban policy-makers.

‘‘Now I conduct workshops to de-school urban adults and develop sensibilities,’’ said Jinan. The humanising of professions gives then back the blessedness of curiosity, an open mind and the will to look at life differently, and on their own terms.

The Aruvacode sojourn has been longer than any that Jinan has undertaken, ‘‘I never stay for more than six months in one place, but Aruvacode has been different.’’ In more ways than one. One, Jinan has managed to propel an entire village on to the right track, improve their living conditions, not by seeking aid, but making them fend for themselves. Two, unappreciated fully even by the potters, he has helped save their craft. Some cause for celebration, surely.

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