EP 257 . 29 Nov 22
In episode # 244, Sumana Chandrashekar spoke about History of Ghatam. Immediately after the episode was released, Sangeeta Jawla connected and suggested that we could have done a pre-cursor to the Ghatam episode and document the “pot”. Well, better late then never. Today we have Sangeeta with us on Audiogyan to talk about the clay as a material and it’s history through stories and folklores.
Sangeeta is a research scholar, a practicing potter and a storyteller. She engraves the potters’ folk narratives (collected all across India) on the clay canvas. The visual depiction of the potter’s folk and real-life narratives help us understand the community’s folklore, social relations and material culture differently. Additionally, as a woman practitioner, she also focus on the question of women agency, since in most traditional potter communities women are not allowed to touch the wheel, even while they fully engage with all other aspects of pottery production, from preparing clay to decorating to selling. We’ll try and document few stories and a brief history of clay intersecting from mythology to ecology and more…