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A clay pot sitting in the sun will always be a clay pot. It has to go through the white heat of the furnace to become porcelain. — Mildred Stouven I do not know much about ceramics: neither about clay and porcelain, nor glazes and fretwork, nor, of course, about faience and celadon. But occasionally, this world — ancient and complex, amazingly vast and visually exciting — swims into my awareness. As when, years ago, I happened to read through the report of a research project funded by the Crafts Museum in Delhi on contemporary pottery produced in Khurja in Uttar Pradesh. In it, I was struck by the mention of a simple earthen plate fashioned by a village potter that carried — if I remember it right — this little verse in Urdu inscribed in black: Ek mitti ki bas rakaab
hoon main (What am I, but a simple dish made of earth? But now that I am occupying a place on your table, I feel as if a particle of dust had turned into the sun itself!). Wit, humility, marketing, all rolled into one, apart from the craft of course.
Again — and this too goes back some years — in the course of a visit to the famous Shreyas Museum in Ahmedabad, I saw a large group of tall-glazed earthen pots, used apparently for storage, that someone had found lying on the seashore somewhere in Gujarat and gifted these to the museum. These wonderful objects had obviously been drifting on the waters for hundreds of years, perhaps, and had somehow been deposited by the waves on the shore. Ancient trade routes came to mind, for was it not from these coasts that some goods used to be sent once to far off lands and others imported from those regions into our own? More recently, I met with an architect in Delhi who had been producing large, solid, weight-bearing columns of terracotta, and using these in civic architecture. It was all earth and fire, and at least, I had never seen anything quite like it. I admit I know a little more than this about objects made from earth, but still pitifully little. For the area of study is measureless — stretching from the Far East to the New World — and the time span immense: from several thousand years BC to our own day. Despite this, I was drawn to a relatively limited, even though still enormous, area: ceramics from Islamic lands. And in that especially to a book by Oliver Watson on the collection of the highly distinguished al-Sabah family, now in the National Museum of Kuwait, for in it were nuggets of all kinds: not only about a bewildering but exquisite range of objects but also detailed references to a very early work — dating back to ca. 1300 CE — on the theme of making and designing objects from earth. It is a manuscript penned by Abu’l Qasim, member of a leading Iranian family of ceramic makers of Kashan, who had been employed as a historian at the Mongol court. Abu’l Qasim’s treatise was on The Virtues of Jewels and the Delicacies of Perfumes but in it, he had brought in a long chapter on the art of ceramics. The writer, it seems, knew everything that was then known about techniques: things he had learnt in the family, for his brother, father, and grandfather were all potters, producing mostly luxury wares. Knowledge about materials, their preparation, the making and firing of pots, kilns and kiln-furniture, was all within easy reach for him. For outsiders like me, the text is not easy to follow, for there is so much of technical detail in it. All the same, it is fascinating to get close to a complete insider’s view of things. Speaking of the range of materials, for instance, he says: "The first substance is hajar-i-maha, known in Arabic as hasat, and by craftsmen as shukar-i-sang. It is a white, clear, shiny stone, less clear than rock crystal, but clearer than white marble`85 Its deposits are in many places". The reference, as Watson points out, is to quartz, gathered as pebbles and not as sand. Details about substances go on after this, till we reach a point where he speaks of the ‘ninth substance’: "The ninth substance is a white, sticky, strong clay. It is found everywhere but the white one is rarer. The Kashani type is white and very strong, and the craftsmen call it warkani and Luri after a village and the Lurs. One type of it is like white snow, and its mine is in the mountains of Na’in near Isfahan. It is mixed with plaster and used to whitewash the houses." This, however, is just the beginning. The mixing of clay, the kneading and beating, the delicate act of throwing on the wheel, the scraping and rubbing, all follow in dense sequences. Materials for glazes are gone into; colourants spoken of; we hear of lead and tin and roasted copper; the value of grape juice and vinegar and smoke is emphasised. How the colour of two firings can be obtained through a special technique is described. "When they (the vessels) are cold", Abu’l Qasim says, "take them out and rub them with damp earth so that the colour of gold comes out. That which has been evenly fired reflects like gold and shines like the light of the sun." In his very substantial volume, Oliver Watson takes us through all this, and much more: Ceramic families and Technical Traditions, for instance; Restoration of Ceramics; and so on, before embarking upon a dense catalogue of ceramics from Iran and Syria and Egypt, Turkey and India and Afghanistan. One can only stand at the edge of this world, and wonder. But one thing that I did understand was his and other scholars’ concerns about fakes and forgeries, for the prices of these objects are of serious proportions now. His distinction between these two — a fake and a forgery — was of great interest to me even if it is in the context of ceramics, and I shall end with it. "A fake is an innocent object", he writes, "possibly original but ‘improved’ in some way to enhance its interest and thereby its value. Faking is found as repainting, addition of dates and signatures, new gilding, replacement of missing pieces, and marriage of genuine, but non-belonging parts. Forgery is the entirely non-innocent making of an object from scratch, specifically designed to deceive." Fine distinctions, but in both cases we are, as is clear, in the area of greed and lack of scruples. All of it, as Arthur Upham Pope wrote, leading to "falsifications that mislead the public, corrupt aesthetic standards, distort history...."
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