The Last Water Jar 2011

8/7/2019 The Last Water Jar 2011

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The Last Water Jar

Text and photos by Jim Danisch 2011

Lightning strikes yellow earth, blindingly fusing it into natures terra cotta,changing its color to red, brown, orange, white, gray or black, sometimes leavingbehind strange fused bits of metal that are sought as amulets. Potters havesimulated and controlled this process since before memory. The names for theparts of a pot -- lip, mouth, neck, shoulder, belly, underbelly, foot -- are imbeddedin the beginnings of language. Although we have lost its everyday presence in ourelectronic culture, the archetypal water jar is deeply integrated our collective

unconscious, and is remarkably similar around the world, whether it is uncoveredin an archaeological excavation inPeru or in the street market inKathmandu. Its nature is round orovoid, shell like, formed to meet hipor head, stretched as thin as the claypermits the maker, fitted with a neckand mouth that leads to a darkwomb interior, and of a size thatwomen can carry comfortably. It isalways unique to the neighborhood

where it is made easilyrecognizable by its form and the wayit resonates sound. When it is gonefrom a culture, it means theextinction of yet another simplefunction that brought people togetherin the closely woven social nettypical of the pre-industrial world.

It is the khumba, the pot that inritual sometimes is the head, or

intellect that needs to be broken toattain God realization; sometimesthe chest, the storehouse of pranaand location of khumbaka, breathretention used by yogis to raiseKundalini.

Symbolically, the potters wheel as

Tharu water jar, Nepal


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great god Vishnus discus spins out the Hindu creation myth. As the universe wasset in motion, so is the soft, formless clay first spun to the center of the wheel, theprimordial still point, where it naturally assumes the shape of a linga -- the maleprinciple. Next the potter opens a yoni -- the female principle -- which is shapedlike a womb and will become pregnant with the potters creative energy. After this

marriage, he can birth any form. When held to the ear, water jars tell the story ofhuman endeavor on earth: the sound is like surf in the ocean that is heard fromthe ritual conch shell, complete with echoes of gossip at the well, satisfied chatterin the kitchen, warfare and suffering, great music and overheard intrigues. Inmuch of Nepal and India, every village household still keeps a water jar -- thewater stays cool without refrigeration, is freshened by some mysterious alchemicaleffect of the clay, and remains one of the few ritualized connections to the past.The element water along with its container has a major role in most religions.

Ive been involved with Asian potters since 1979; as a potter myself, Ive learned tolisten to the song of the water jar from these unassuming people, who live in

villages that resonate every morning to the sound of hundreds of pots beingbeaten into form by craftspeople who know precisely when the pot is finished bythe sound it produces, in perfect tune with all the potters in the village. Inparticular, beginning in 1986, I worked closely with Tharu (Tah-roo) people, alarge and very old ethnic group in the lowlands of southern Nepal. Nobody knowstheir origins. When the government of Nepal eradicated malaria in the 1950s,freeing up thousands of square miles for agricultural use (and inevitabledeforestation), most of the Tharus, who had no system of land ownership, weredisenfranchised when their land was distributed as political favors. Thesenortherners cut down the jungle, worshipped different gods, and claimed land thatthe Tharus, in their innocence, never knew could be owned. The area is calledDeokhuri, and until the peoples revolution in 1990, was ruled benevolently by afeudal Raja who lived in a rambling stucco palace with at least 70 extended familymembers and retainers. It is the same scale as the palace in which the Buddhawas raised, just two days' walk from here (and about four hours by car, if the roadswere ever in good condition).

Outside the village, on the way to the forest, is a small stucco temple shaded by agreat mango grove, several hundred years old, owned by the Raja. Inside, Durgarides on her tiger above an altar, on which stand small terra cotta animals, placedthere by the potters of eleven villages. Durga translates as Beyond Reach, andis one of the primary names of the Mother Goddess. She slew the buffalo demon,who symbolizes death, and restored the universe. As such, she is worshipped inher various forms at the great Autumn harvest festival, Dasain, and each villageprovides a new horse or elephant or tiger. The temple is the center of the potterssociety, who sometimes meet there in hundreds, under a wise old mango tree, tomake community decisions.


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Almost out

of sight,snow peaks shine --

horizon mounted mirages

far from the valley footpaths ofgravel and clay

Bare feet treading Himalayan debris

spewed by monsoon torrentcharging to the Ganga

We can walk to India in one dayand we know about camels in

Rajasthan

Over 600 potters live in this widevalley, in long, thatched houses thatappear to be rooted in the ground --their roofs come down so low --semicircular door openings breakingthe edge. Men must stoop down toenter the cave-like dark of the interior.At the end of the rainy season, thehouses are camouflaged by rampant

squash vines, which supply both shade and nourishment, and are safely out ofhungry animals' reach. So much are they of the earth, villages create only a smalltextural anomaly on the vast expanse of flood plain, complex in its drainages andforests and fields.

Nobody in the valley can remember when they were not potters. They continue toprovide the necessary ceramic containers for this old culture that spreads overSouthwestern Nepal and into northern India. These people call themselves Tharu,and lived for centuries as a nondestructive part of the lowlands ecology, theirpopulation held in balance by climate and disease. Each Tharu house has aspecial alcove for the gods. There are clay horses and there is the first clay man.

Tharu potters on the road


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The landscape appears simple and flat when seen from a distance -- its horizonarticulated by surrounding low hills and distant hints of snow peaks. But walkingthrough it is indirect, diverted by unforeseen complexities of waterways, riceplantation and bamboo groves, which curve the road around all the places a mancannot walk. Dirt tracks, dug with simple hand tools and maintained by village

volunteers as a form of direct taxation, are smoothed by the feet of humans andanimals, and in recent years, a couple of motorized vehicles a day. Large herds ofbullocks are sent out every morning to graze and produce dung -- a valuable multi-purposed substance used for fertilizer, architecture and fuel. Fresh cow dungcontains albumin -- an excellent glue and binder -- and fiber, both of whichcontribute to the strength and water resistance of mud applied to the woven reedmats that define house walls. At cow time every evening, the herd returns withits cloud of dust.

Sometimes dust and sometimes mud.

Wattle and daub, clay and cowdungshape the architecture

in fluid, hand-smoothed planes

Earth and water determine theswelling

shape of the potsas they provide

the medium for cropsClay lies in the stream crossings

thick and clinging

Brilliant reflectionshot sun, steamy fieldsoutlined by earthen dikes

Squash on thatch

Entering a Tharu long house requiresbending low, but once inside, there isa feeling of spaciousness, reachingup to the darkness under the peak ofthe roof. The space is dividedsculpturally into bedrooms, kitchenand storage, by monumental clayand cow dung grain containers thatgrow from the floor up to head height.In the dark interior, they have the

Potter's house


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presence of guardians. Above these, bunches of hanging objects punctuate thedark -- baskets, dry corn, implements that in their unfamiliarity stimulate imaginedpurposes.

Inside it is dark

the rafters are hung heavy with

pottery andbaskets andmysterious dark packages

all at differentlevels

ascending into the deepest dark

which gathers under the thatched crown

What is it?Oh --we keep things in it.

What things?You know our own things

Men work together in common house


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Varying amounts of food, work, rest, water, ritual and alcohol are the main featuresof everyday life. Whether Tharus live or die depends on the grace and power oftheir gods, who, like Nepal itself, are stressed by the increasing number of evilspirits and foreign devils that are entering their world. Darkness is kept at bay justoutside the village boundary, where the guardians shrine stands outside a mango

grove. It is activated by the frequent cycles of ceremony that are necessary tokeep the universe in balance. Earth, water, fire, air and space -- the makings of awater jar and a universe.

Strong-backed women balancing jars on their heads gather at the well with its fourcorner posts, carved as deities, gossiping while they wait their turn to run thebucket down on its rope. Gods control both water and gossip; perhaps water jarscarry the gossip home to whisper it from their seats in the earthen floor to thecooking fire in its clay tripod. Squatting, the women feed the fire and stir the terracotta cooking pots. These pots are only made by women; they form them withouta wheel, in ritual unison, at the same time of year, and fire them behind their

houses. At meal time, the rice tastes of smoke and talk.

As sharecroppers forced to give half the crop to the landlord, men must earn morerice by making pottery as much as possible, using enormous wheels shaded bysmall huts. This is how to make a potters' wheel: Start by crossing two timbers ofsal wood, hard and heavy and four feet long. Wrap split bamboo around this crossto make a circle. Then mix clay, straw, rice hulls, cow dung, goat hair andmolasses to form the great disc.

If you wait a year or two, one of the fast-talking traders who has been with the wildmen in the mountains will pass by, bringing rare and wonderful things. They knowa place in the high valleys, where Vishnu has caused round black stones to befound in the river bed. As the mountains come sliding and crashing down eachrainy season, the irresistible monsoon-swollen river carries, crushes and sortswhatever it swallows -- mountain fragments, rocks, Vishnu's discus, ancient andrecent dust -- and tumbling black saligram stones. When cracked open, theyreveal Vishnu's spiral, as the positive and negative of a fossilized snail shell,resurrected from its incalculably old seabed, shoved up by Indian as it plows underChina.


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The potters wheel weighs over 100 kilos


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Potters wheels are manifestations of Vishnu, the union of yoni and linga, theturning circle, the center and the circumference, bound into unity by cow dung.This is a heavy load of symbolism to turn around, and the wheel properly has oneof these saligrams as the pivot stone.

Make a stake of ironwood, broad at the base to bury in the earth, and pointed atthe top to spin the saligram.Set in place and turned with astick placed in a depressionon the circumference, thisgiant top is ready to defygravity for long minutes. Thepotter has magic in his stick,whipping the wheel off theground -- Vishnus discus thatspins his lump of mud into the

world of hollow singing forms.

The seasonal pulse ofagriculture coalescesenergies. When fields aredry, men dig clay and makepots to trade for rice, which iseaten or preferably, made intobeer for breakfast. If there isenough, the beer is distilledinto rakshi to blur hard realitya bit more. When the fieldsare wet and pots wont dry,men wait for the rice to grow.Women work all the time.When a stranger comes, theyhide inside the house withtheir babies.

Our life is like this:

Hard when we plow the groundhard to persuade the seeds to grow

hard when we have no money,on the road, trading clay

pots for rice

Saligram stone -- fossilized ammonite


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peddling empty water jarsfor full belly

in the monsoon waters we live on an island

sailing on brown floodsrolling boulders shake our housesthe river eats our land

Rice greens the full flooded paddiesbut our plates are empty

little sistergets sick and diesThe doctor went to Kathmanduhe doesnt like the monsoonWe have nowhere to go.

When the crops come in

full stomach, maybe

We sit in the winter sunsit in the dusty courtyard

Play with the children

Today theres rice to make beer

to drink in the afternoon

A man can touch the godsjust enough to persist inbeing a man

Sun dissolves the chilly dense fog of early morning, with its cloaked figureswalking barefoot on their morning errands. Drumming begins outside the pottery-making houses, as yesterday's half-formed pots are expanded into their finalglobular resonant shapes with wooden paddle and terra cotta anvil, some of themfully as big as the men who drum their forms, expanding the clay until it isstretched as thin as the shell of an ostrich egg. Water jars are never empty: whenthey are not holding water, they contain sound; each standard shape having itsown resonant frequency, as if the potters scattered throughout the village tunetheir jars to each other. After years of use, the mushroom-shaped clay anvils thathold the curve against the wooden paddle are as shiny as mirrors. In the Hinducreation myths, sound was the first manifestation of the sentient world.


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Sun dries the clay. A group of pots isbeaten in several stages during a day,as the form slowly stiffens into finality.Drying pots are moved in and out of thesun for several days: into the thatched

pottery hut at night to protect them fromdew, and back out each morning, untilthere are enough to make a firing --usually several hundred pieces rangingfrom small water or rakshi pots aboutseven inches in diameter, up to the bigstorage pots that may reach two feet ormore. Although the function, size andproportions of each pot are standardfrom village to village, decorationidentifies the pots origins. Some villages impress designs with the end sections of

reeds, others make simple stippled bands; the most elaborate are finger paintedby the women in Gaduwa Village.

On the day of the firing, the pieces are coated with a shiny, thin clay slip known asgabij, which adds beauty to the surface and can be used for finger painting. Thisis the same technology that was used all over the world before glazes weredeveloped. We are most familiar with it from Greek and Roman pottery. Theprocess of transforming clay back into stone is alchemical; firing is a time ofexcitement and tension for potters in any country or historical period. Even withmodern state-of-the-art technology, there is still mystery around what happensinside the kiln; too hot to feel, too bright to see. The fire is managed, but nottrustworthy. There is always the potential of the fire getting out of our control anddestroying days of work. The fire master's job is a crucial one, and he works witha combination of experience, magic, guesswork and good hunches, tuning hisintuition to the sound and subtle cues of escaping moisture and quality of smoke.

Her finger is the primordial brush


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The floor of the communal firing house is layered with these great brittle shells ofclay, systematically stacked in an oval heap that may be twenty or thirty feet indiameter and three to four feet high, packed in the interstices with firewood.Miraculously, men can walk on the load, as they cover it over with a mixture of clayand straw. The result is a shiny, wet low mound which occupies most of the firinghouse, waiting for the fire to dry it into a hard, cracked crust at the end of the firing.

Tharu firing house with pots ready for firing


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As with all transformative events, a ritual offering is made to the fire gods, and theofficiating potter walks around the huge stack, drawing a line in the claycircumference with his four fingers -- this is to prevent the entry of malevolentspirits that can and frequently do destroy pots. The fire is started from one side,and by periodically opening vent holes with a pole, is guided inside what looks like

the world's biggest pie crust. A large firing may take two days. The fire masterdozes on a string bed by the firing, waking every few hours to make more ventholes. The heap smokes; now and again the crust breaks, revealing the red glowof embers and seemingly transparent glowing walls of pots. These gaps arecovered by large floppy discs of clay and straw to conserve the heat. The processis slow and deliberate, in keeping with all time in the Tharu culture. Eventually, thefire has moved across the heap and used up all its fuel. The pots cool for half aday.

No need to rush

the fire

It movesat its own rateand decides the fateof our pots and our bellies

both empty waiting to be filled

At the time of unloading, everybody comes to see if the fire gods werecooperative. It is usual to lose up to half of the products in firing, depending on thevagaries of drying, wind, firewood, and whatever stray or malignant spirits camewandering by. Call the shaman to cure the problem; he knows the science ofcause and effect.

He will talk with the spiritsand ask them

to maintain the wind in our pots

...we are poor people...

without the windthere would be no song in our hearts


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In the open spaces in the village, stacks of identical water jars identify pottershouses. Identical until you go to choose one. The curves differ by millimeters;surfaces have been colored by the fires tongue; but even in the dark there is onepot that will stand out, perhaps because of its special resonance. Pots in themarket are tapped to make sure they ring clearly: a cracked pot sounds dead.

But this is not the resonance I am getting at. It is not a quality you can measurewith an instrument: call it magic, or devotion -- the product of a moment ofsynchronicity in the potters life when all his skills, the weather, the mood of theday, and the five elements came together in a small epiphany.

As summer approaches, the heat builds for weeks, each day's tension formingclouds, which fail to bring relief, except for occasional disastrous winds that carryonly enough rain to frustrate hope and destroy firings. Finally, the sky swells withwater from the South and dumps it in great floods on the barren fields. Gratefully,the people plant rice, which greens the valley floor, thriving on monsoon fecundity.

World of muck and greenstruck by the sun bursting

through dark sheets of hard-hitting rain

boiling black sky.

The deluge persists during three months of skyburst when virtually no work can bedone. The roads are impassable, disease strikes, and the people subsist on onebowl of rice gruel per day while the water swells the next crop. At last the time offeasting comes, followed by clay gathering and a renewal of the rhythm of potmaking.

In the time that started before memory, the Rapti River has meandered over theDeokhuri Valley in unpredictable ways -- every one hundred thousand years thereis a cataclysmic flood that takes everything with it down to India; perhaps every tenthousand years it deposits an exceptionally well-ground layer of fine, plastic brownclay. Every year, there comes silt and gravel. In recent years, clay is found aboutten feet underground in the flood plain, in a layer that ranges from 1 to 3 feet deep.In the annual cycles of renewal, the river regularly takes a village and its farmland,forcing the people to squat in new areas, which are becoming very scarce.


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Every year, the potters must dig through the monsoons mud and silt deposits tothis layer, and carry it to their villages -- a walk of 1 to 3 hours, using a pole overthe shoulders with two baskets hanging from the ends. The clay is soaked withwater, kneaded by foot, and made into a mound half as tall as a man. The moundis covered with sand, which is wet down with water, and sits like a large, living

presence in the dark shade of the workshop. It takes six days to prepare a ton ofclay. This is the season of Dasain or Durga Puja, which requires the biggest feastcycle of the year, and the entire village, from grandparents to grandchildren, isbusy making pots and loading them in the communal firing house. New water jarsand small clay horses -- household deities -- are a necessary part of thecelebrations: they must be renewed each year and installed ritually.

When there are enough pots, half the village goes on the road. There is limitedlocal demand, so the potters walk long distances. To walk from Deokhuri over thehills north to Dang takes two days. It is where hill people come to trade, andamong other purchases they carry pots up the mountain. The potters could go by

bus, but either they do not have the necessary few rupees, or they claim thatbreakage is high, or they simply never do things that way. Instead, you can seegroups of them, carrying as much as possible. Men with their carrying poles,women with stacks on their heads. If you calculate the costs, they do not earntheir own labor. But they need the small amount of cash they can earn to buy saltand oil, and they come back with bags of rice. It may be that the hard work andfun of going to the bazaar together is reward enough for people on the edgebetween hard survival and simple joy. It is an opportunity for the young men andwomen to sneak off into the forest.

(Camped for the night on the roadside, men and women squat around theirseparate fires, heaps of pots illuminated by the flames.)

Where are you going?South to the big country.

What will you do?

Our life is like this:

Walk to eateat to walk

And a little rakshi in the eveningto warm us

And in the dark, to catch a silent girlin the wild moonlit jungle


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There are times for drinking and dancing. During the Holi festival, brown skinsturn day glow red and rainbow violet, as powder paint is thrown at all passers by.The center of evening celebrations is a veiled, silk-flashed dancer -- a femaleimpersonator, who can dance freely where the women cannot. Everybodywatches, pouring beer and rakshi into open mouths from wonderfully functional,

phallus-spouted pots -- the spouts crowned by a spiral bird's head. Later, menand women do the old circle dances, after everybody is drunk enough to lose theirshyness.

In February-March, all people who are able to walk a day come to the festival ofShiva, held in the Lord of Deokhuri's mango grove. The mood and structure arereminiscent of an American county fair, with rows of bamboo booths roughlythatched with leafy branches, where you can buy bangles and baubles, deep-friedsweets, tattoos, rice and beans, have your fortune told, get your broken kerosenelantern fixed, take your chances at ring-toss or the Wheel of Fortune. The biggestattraction is a video show, which arrives hanging from a procession of twenty

coolies -- monitor, tape deck, speakers, table, cash box, petrol and a generatorthat sputters its way through a Hindi film. Three times.

After that, there is a stage show, with its cloth proscenium hung from the trees anda car battery-powered sound system. After several false starts, five seductivesingers, dressed in iridescent saris, swing their hips onto the stage. Their falsettovoices give them away, but their energetic rendition and pranks keep the actinteresting. They are female impersonators by caste, a lineage that goes backmore generations than they can remember. Vaudeville is alive and healthy inDeokhuri. The funky band goes on until dawn, with a rapt audience of about onethousand people huddled close together in their shawls, on the ground. Thecrowd is well behaved, probably because the Lord and his sons carry big sticksand manage the crowd easily -- with threats alone. Drunks are carried off andstuffed into empty oil drums for the night. After several days of feasting, pottersreturn to work.

I witnessed a major cultural transformation one year. After thousands of years ofround bottoms, the Tharus have started to slightly flatten the base of their waterpots. This occurred because cement floors have become popular and you can nolonger set your water jars directly in a hollow in the earth. I witnessed anothermajor change a few years later, when the price of a water jar jumped from 25 to 40Rupees -- 35 to 60 cents. This is a big difference to people who make 70 Rupeesa day. Firewood used to be collected freely by the potters wives, who go into thenearby jungle every morning with hatchets balanced on their heads, and return inthe afternoon with huge loads of firewood in their place. This year the governmentset up guards at all the forest entrances. Their job is to collect ten rupees tax oneach load of wood. The only other option is itinerant labor in Rajasthan, wheremany of the potters already go to harvest crops seasonally. The effect may wellbe to permanently destroy a way of life.


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We don't have any wood to burnThere is a government now, we are toldThere is a government come to squeeze us

The forest officers squeeze us

Obese and oily, they make us squat at their doorstepsThey all know how to squeeze usHow thin can we get?

In Deokhuri, potters' wheels are madefrom the same materials as houses

Bamboo, clay and cow dungVishnus spiral saligram stonespinning on a sharpened stake

the potterturns a lingathen he turns a yoniform comes of this union...

You can hear the joy of it if you listen closely

The wheel turns slower and slowerand slowlyleans down to groundJust move slow...We are not of your world.We have animal eyestrust comes slow

In every earth home

we keep the first clay manand alert clay horsesin the shrinein the corner.

(You cant have any ideahow fastthe modern devils are slipping in.to eat up your first manand the clay horsesand the magic hand prints on the mud wall)


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(No one tells youCoca Cola in the village storemade of sugar and statuswill take all

your cash keep you in debtto the Lord of Deokhuriwho may be benevolentbut gets his dues)

Revolution or notSlavery persists even in dem-o-crassyslavery humanizedby a certain sense of dignity in inequity

the long house where the men

smokeand talkand drink

and beat out the curve of their world

the resonant contour of great pots

empty songs waiting for the wind

to sound them


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EpilogueMost of the preceding words were written before 2001, when I had to stop going toDeokhuri because of political unrest. I was finally able to return in 2008, and foundthe situation changed, but not as profoundly as I expected. Pottery is still being

made to the old standards, but in reduced quantities. Instead of being taken tomarket on foot and exchanged for rice, it is usually loaded into a truck to be sold tomiddlemen. More of the young men are working as laborers in neighboring India,or getting educated and moving to the city. The entire village of Gaduwa, the onlyone where the painted jars are produced, is evaporating. In the last few years,about half of its houses have been abandoned.

Once innocent eyes now reflect the memories of guns and abductions and acts ofhot anger. The cooling shade of the Ministers mango grove is no more, cut downby revolutionaries. The hot sun dries the great stumps, and the potters templecollapsed in the last monsoon. Durga still rides her tiger, unaffected by these

small blips of history.

Potters hold a meeting to talk about the uncertain future


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The Last Water Jar 2011