Pottery Villages of Peshawar

t('articles.tweet')

* denotes required field.

• Your name *
• Email to *
• Comments *
• CAPTCHA *

Reset

PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- Haji Abdul Janab’s fingers work magic with the wet clay spinning on a wheel as he shapes it into pottery.

When toiling on the potter’s wheel, Janab is totally engrossed in his work; his foot rotates the wheel, as his hands play with the wet clay to make vases and decorative items.

Janab’s basic tool is his fingers, which transform the clay into different shapes. He relies on the help of only a few old-fashioned instruments for decorating his handiwork.

Eighty-year-old Janab is a resident of Musazai near Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan. “I am living with clay since I was ten and even my father and grandfathers did the same”, Janab told Central Asia Online.

Janab is not the only skilled potter in his family.

He passed along his expertise to his four sons and three daughters. More than a dozen grandchildren are also learning, carrying on the family tradition.

Pottery is source of livelihood for Janab and over 500 other residents of Musazai and nearby Surizai, locally referred to as ‘Kulalano Killi’ – the potters’ villages.

More than a hundred families have lived in the two villages for over a century. They are believed to have descended from a small group of ancestors, and are, in fact, all related.

“Their great-grandfathers settled in the two villages long ago”, said Javed Khan, an elected representative from Musazai.

He said the reason for the potters’ presence in Surizai and Musazai is the availability of fine soil in the nearby fields.

“Their forefathers came here and found the fine earth and got settled”, Javed said, quoting from the oral history of the area. Women folk in the two villages also learn and practice pottery.

anab’s 5-year-old granddaughter Shumaila is a pottery student, learning the skill from her father and other older family members.

She has just started using the potter’s wheel to make ‘Khazana’, ceramic coin banks for children. Her delicate fingers are fast learning to form figures out of the wet clay.

“We work in our houses and our kids learn through seeing”, explained Shumaila’s father Mukhtar Khan, who received his training from his father and uncles.

Potters of Musazai and Surizai do not marry outside their extended families. A potter’s daughter becomes a potter’s wife after marriage.

“My father taught me pottery making. Now I work with my husband”, said a 27-year-old mother of two in Surizai. Her husband did not want his wife’s name to be published.

Young boys bring earth from the nearby fields and mix it with water and sand to make the clay.

“I go to school in the morning and help my parents afterwards”, said a young boy, Muslim Khan.

Women in the families help in cleaning the earth and making the clay indoors. Then, more experienced and talented family members work on potter’s wheels to form the pottery. The pottery is then removed from the wheel and placed in the sun to dry.

Next comes the stage requiring the most skill, when a dried piece of pottery is brought back to the wheel for decoration. The potters of Musazai and Surizai decorate their pots by incising flowers, leaves and decorative bands into the hardened clay.

Afterwards, the pottery is fired in kilns at high temperature to fully harden it. There are some in each family who handle marketing the final product, bargaining with wholesalers that come from around the country to buy the finished product.

Potter Janab still remembers his childhood, when his father used to take pottery to other villages. “My father used to visit far flung areas with donkey loads of dinnerware to sell”.

“Gone are the days when we had pottery lovers in Pakistan”, laments Abdul Rauf Seemab, 80, who runs a pottery shop in Peshawar. Seemab’s forefathers had set up pottery factories in Peshawar’s Shah Wali Qatal Street in the early 20th century.

But the pottery factories closed down when business slumped a few decades back. Modernization proved a blow to pottery business in this part of the world.

“Once kitchenware and dinnerware were the most sellable commodities”, recalled Janab, who regretted that stoneware and steel utensils made their product obsolete.

But the potters of Musazai and Surizai went with the tide and changed the nature of their work.

“Earlier we used to make kitchenware. But people don’t use earthen utensils anymore”, said Tawab Khan, a potter from Musazai.

Now potters in the two villages have switched over to flower pots, water pitchers and small decoration pieces. “Those in Musazai and Surizai are the only potters left in this region”, regretted Seemab.

While the potters of Musazai and Surizai have survived and adapted to changing tastes, the present security situation in Peshawar and elsewhere in Pakistan has dealt another blow to business. Tawab’s sales were cut almost in half during 2009, when Peshawar witnessed more than two dozen bomb blasts.

“These blasts have affected my business badly”, Khan said.