Turning the wheel full circle and some more

For Aruvacode is a village back from the brink. From potters to prostitutes to potters again, the village has moulded itself in respectability.

‘‘So don’t speak of that to other people. And tell them not to talk about that. Tell them we are potters,’’ says Ramani*. ‘‘Or I will put the phone down.’’

It’s the same with 62-year-old Aputichamy, his 65-year-old brother Chamy Chettiyar, 16-year-old Santosh and 36-year-old Valli. ‘‘We’ve always been potters.’’ Parents? ‘‘Potters.’’ Grandparents? ‘‘Potters.’’ They are firm this time.

‘‘They refuse to speak of their past because they just don’t want to remember it. Some of the girls here don’t even know who their fathers are but will say nothing,’’ says K B Jinan, who went there in 1992 as a design consultant for Oxfam Bridge, part of a UK-based charity organisation.

‘‘A police inspector named Radhakrishnan had weaned them away from the sex trade, but he didn’t know what to do after that. I knew these people were potters from Andhra Pradesh who had migrated to north Kerala. But since they were Telugu-speaking, they got isolated from the rest of the state. So while Kerala progressed, they got left behind and turned to peddling sex. I suggested they return to their original calling — pottery.’’

Aruvacode wasn’t too convinced, but gave it a shot. Today pottery is all that its denizens do. They have Kumbham (their brand), architectural and landscaping contracts from Hyderabad, Tamil Nadu and Cochin, orders from Gujarat and Maharastra, a testimony in terracotta that rests with Ashok Leyland’s Managing Director, another one at Shilparamam in Hyderabad’s high-tech city, an office, a website… the works.

Eighty potters have turned into 150 families. Life has changed in Aruvacode. For the better. They say it’s thanks to their ‘sir’ who has trained them, who sustains them, and who still lives with them.

‘‘I did nothing,’’ says their sir, Jinan. ‘‘I believe everybody is creative. And the only way to draw people out is to do nothing. I have brought so many students from various institutes here and they always ask me: what kind of qualification do you need to create these things? I believe if you know how to cut vegetables and have not gone to school, you can do this. None of the potters here use a mould, that’s what keeps their work so alive,’’ says Jinan.

‘‘We have mud in our blood,’’ says Chamy. ‘‘It’s all we’ve ever had,’’ says Ramani.

What about the past? Do they think they will ever return to it? Ramani hangs up.

* Name changed.