Raju Meena

My great-great-grandfather learned the craft from Persian traders who came through Jaipur in the 1800s. It is a strange craft for India — we use no clay from the earth. Blue pottery is made from quartz stone powder, katira gum and multani mitti. No one in my family questioned why. We just knew the formula, passed hand to hand through five generations like a sacred text.

In my twenties the market collapsed. Cheap Chinese ceramics flooded every store that used to stock my father's pots. He was devastated — he had spent his entire life building a reputation, and suddenly nobody cared about provenance. We nearly sold the workshop. I spent two years working construction in Jaipur city, coming home on weekends to keep the kiln alive. I could not let the craft die with my father's generation.

Blue pottery fires at a low temperature — just 800 degrees. That sounds simple. It is not. The glaze, made from oxide of cobalt and copper, behaves differently every firing depending on humidity, the density of the piece, the stack position in the kiln. I have ruined hundreds of pieces. The ones that survive are not the strongest — they are the luckiest, and the most carefully loved. I never fire more than twenty pieces at once. Each one gets my full attention.

I now run classes for young potters in Sanganer. I believe if even ten of my students carry this forward, five generations from now someone will still be firing these strange, beautiful, non-clay pots. Karuvya has connected me to buyers who ask the right questions: how is it made, how long does it take, who made it. That matters more to me than the price.