The obscure pocket of Arapalayam is a chaotic maze of narrow lanes, old rickety buildings, frantic vehicles and an excessively vivacious crowd. Apart from the bus terminus that’s a major landmark of the area, it’s the potters that lend Arapalayam an indispensable character. Long since, shopping for earthenware meant travelling to Arapalayam which was once the western boundary of the city. Men, women and children belonging to families of potters lay out their wares faithfully in the dozen shops lining the main road, adding colour to the scene. Just behind the façade of the shops, narrow bylanes lead to their pigeon-hole houses where once pottery was a flourishing trade.
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“This entire road was dotted with kilns where we baked pots. Every house would have at least a pair of wheels and both men and women were adept in shaping mud into smooth round pots,” says G. Vasantha, who sits all day at her shop, going about arranging, painting and sorting the merchandise. “But over the years, the area became a part of the city and there’s space crunch. The few tanks around Arapalayam have all vanished under buildings and we struggle to source mud which is the main raw material for the art.” The potters here have become so estranged from their traditional occupation that none of them practise or know pottery today. “It has all become a thing of the past. We now source earthenware from villages like Kidaripatti and mainly Mana Madurai, where people still continue pottery,” says G. Valli, an elderly woman.
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Called as ‘ Kazhalars’ or ‘ Kuyavars’, the potters had traditional settlements in Madurai. Pockets like Mela Anuppanadi and Chinna Kanmoi still have a few families left while ‘Pazhaya Kuyavarpalayam’, which as the name suggests must have been a village of potters, doesn’t have a single family today. “From the king’s times, pottery was an important handicraft apart from metallurgy and textile crafts. But it’s a fragile artform in which even a single mistake can cost you dearly. The time and speeds of the rotation of the wheel, composition and consistency of the clay and the skill of the potter determine the end product.” says M. Jayakumar, who runs a shop at Mela Anuppanadi.
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“Everything in pottery is connected to nature. It’s the sky and the earth that decides our lives,” says S. Subbulakshmi, an elderly woman. “Too much of either rain or shine can change the texture of the mud and we may not be able to do business. That’s why we consider the earth as our God and anything made of clay has life in it.”
“For potters, Karthikai Deepam and Pongal used to be bigger than Diwali as we did good business. The month of ‘Karthikai’ is ideally the season of North East Monsoon and hence people would begin making lamps two months before the festival,” informs G. Vasantha, busy segregating the lamps based on the designs. Locally called as ‘mann chitti’ or ‘agal vilakku’, the earthen lamps come in a variety of sizes and designs, ranging from as cheap as Rs.five or Rs.10 to Rs.250. Making of the miniscule lamps is a time-consuming and tedious job, say the potters. “Only an expert potter can make earthen lamps as they are small to hold just a finger of two. In the making, there are more chances for the lamps to break or become disfigured in shape,” says S. Azhagu Meena.
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The small hamlet of Manamadurai in the neighbouring Sivaganga district is said to be blessed with the best kind of soil that suits pottery. The place is surrounded by numerous dry ponds and lakes, the beds of which are rich in soil wealth. The potters of Manamadurai have also upgraded to mechanically-run wheels and readymade moulds that have made the job easier. It is from here that modern designs of lamps and pots are sourced. The humble earthen lamp now comes in bright colourful avatars and as ‘adukku vilakku’, in which groups of lamps are arranged on layers and joined with a single stem. “It is tradition to buy a couple of new lamps every Karthikai, but the new designs have caught the fancy of shoppers,” says Azhagu Meena.
