Meet the maker
The Blue-Pottery Painters of Sanganer
Hand-painted Jaipur blue pottery
Cluster: Sanganer, near Jaipur — Rajasthan
Blue pottery is not really Indian, and it is not really pottery. The technique travelled from Persia through Central Asia and arrived with the Mughal courts, and it is made without clay — quartz stone ground to powder, mixed with powdered glass, multani mitti, borax and gum, pressed into moulds and fired at a low temperature. That is why a blue-pottery bowl feels lighter than it looks, and why it chips rather than cracks.
Jaipur's chapter begins with a kite fight. Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh II watched two brothers from Achnera cut down his own kite-masters' strings at a tournament, discovered that the potters coated their string with the same blue-green glass frit they used to glaze their pots, and brought them to Jaipur to teach at his craft school. The craft flourished for roughly a century, then very nearly disappeared by the early twentieth century.
It survives because of one painter. Kripal Singh Shekhawat — trained at Shantiniketan and in Tokyo, and the man who illustrated pages of the original Constitution of India — rebuilt the craft workshop by workshop from 1963, with the backing of Rajmata Gayatri Devi and Kamladevi Chattopadhyay. He received the Padma Shri in 1974 and the Shilp Guru award in 2002. Jaipur blue pottery now carries a Government of India GI tag.
Several hundred families still work it, clustered around Sanganer and the Amer Road, many of them second generation from the post-revival years. A batch takes six to eight weeks, because each piece is shaped, dried, painted freehand and fired in sequence — the cobalt outline you see was drawn once, by hand, with no way to correct it.
We select finished pieces from workshops across the Sanganer cluster rather than commissioning a single studio, so the hand behind any given piece varies.
Jaipur's chapter begins with a kite fight. Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh II watched two brothers from Achnera cut down his own kite-masters' strings at a tournament, discovered that the potters coated their string with the same blue-green glass frit they used to glaze their pots, and brought them to Jaipur to teach at his craft school. The craft flourished for roughly a century, then very nearly disappeared by the early twentieth century.
It survives because of one painter. Kripal Singh Shekhawat — trained at Shantiniketan and in Tokyo, and the man who illustrated pages of the original Constitution of India — rebuilt the craft workshop by workshop from 1963, with the backing of Rajmata Gayatri Devi and Kamladevi Chattopadhyay. He received the Padma Shri in 1974 and the Shilp Guru award in 2002. Jaipur blue pottery now carries a Government of India GI tag.
Several hundred families still work it, clustered around Sanganer and the Amer Road, many of them second generation from the post-revival years. A batch takes six to eight weeks, because each piece is shaped, dried, painted freehand and fired in sequence — the cobalt outline you see was drawn once, by hand, with no way to correct it.
We select finished pieces from workshops across the Sanganer cluster rather than commissioning a single studio, so the hand behind any given piece varies.