Mantra Handmade Pottery, Company

There is no tradition of stoneware pottery in India although pottery (mostly terracotta ) has been around since a long time. Interestingly enough in Auroville we have a Megalithic Burial ground dating to between 500 BC and 100 AD that has some fine examples of terracotta ware of all sorts of shapes and sizes. We shall try and get some pictures in our Gallery page because they have been a great source of inspiration I learnt by apprenticing at Golden Bridge Pottery for over 3 years. GBP run by Americans Ray and Deborah Meeker pioneered glazed pottery in South India. As a mark of their success there are at least 7 units producing glazed ware and a couple more focussing on terracotta There must be upwards of 12 kilns functioning in the Pondicherry and Auroville area today. It was strange to learn a craft from Americans who were very inspired by the Japanese way. I am Indian and I have had to search within my roots for an expression that I feel comfortable with. At Mantra I encourage the creativity in our dozen or so employees. R. Gopalkrishnan who has been with me for over 12 years is now a master. He runs the whole production ( around 1000 pieces a month ) and is a very talented decorator and thrower. He lives in one of the nearby villages as do all our employees We do everything by hand and use as few tools as possible. In India there are no ceramic supply shops so we have had to search for all our materials and to build all our equipment ourselves, from wheels to banding wheels, kilns, moulds and finally now a ball mill, our first real machine. The kilns are fired with locally grown firewood. We are fortunate that good quality refractories are now available in India and so we can have fairly efficient kilns.