All about the founder of Indian studio pottery

OUR quest of moving towards a more eco-friendly lifestyle today is being fuelled by boutique labels fashioning terracotta bottles and ceramic dinnerware. But the project of giving pottery a modern avatar began in pre-Independent India, when Gurcharan Singh — fresh out of college after earning his bachelor’s degree with honours in geology — took up a summer job at a family friend’s Delhi Pottery Works in 1918. New Delhi was still being built, and the friend, Ram Singh Kabli, was a prominent contractor supplying bricks to the architects of colonial India’s new national capital. It was at such a momentous time that Kabali sent his protégé to study commercial ceramics in Tokyo. Singh returned in 1922, and through the crests and troughs of business against a turbulent background, he set up Delhi Blue Art Pottery, becoming a key founder of studio pottery in India.

Delhi-based designer and art historian Dr Annapurna Garimella will take the audience through this fascinating journey of studio pottery through Singh’s story in her lecture, Wabi-Sabi and Swadeshi: Gurcharan Singh’s Delhi Blue Pottery in Post-Independence Delhi. "Historically, no city has existed without being a centre for craft-making. So, I am looking at craft as an urban phenomenon," says Dr Garimella. The lecture, as the title suggests, will delve into Singh’s approach to studio pottery, which was informed by his knowledge and appreciation of Japanese and Korean practices, and his love for the vibrant blue glaze of the Sultanate-era monuments of Delhi. In fact, in his endeavour to marry the two for his idiom of modern Indian pottery, he sought out the tutelage of Abdullah, a descendant of Pathan potters, to learn the secret of the blue glaze. Singh established pottery research laboratories in Kashmir and Punjab, and went on to receive the Padma Shri in 1991. A fitting honour for the man for whom pottery was poetry.