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Jaipur Blue Pottery: The Glaze That Came From Persia

Made with no clay at all, Jaipur's blue pottery is quartz, glass and cobalt fired into a glaze the colour of a desert sky.

From Persia to the Pink City

Jaipur blue pottery is one of India's most distinctive crafts, and also one of its most misleadingly named: it is not made of clay. Its roots lie in the Turko-Persian world, where potters glazed quartz-based fritware in deep blue, and the technique travelled to India through the Mughal courts. It is said to have come to Jaipur in the nineteenth century under Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh II, a great patron of the arts. Two potters from Achnera, near Agra, Churamani and Kaluram, were appointed by the Maharaja to the ceramic department of the School of Art he had founded in Jaipur in 1866.

Those two artisans had learnt the craft from a follower of Atique Shah, a master craftsman in the court of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor. From that narrow thread of transmission, blue pottery became Jaipur's own. The craft flourished under royal patronage, decorating palaces, tombs and the homes of the wealthy. Then patronage faded, and by the middle of the twentieth century the craft had nearly died out altogether.

Materials: quartz, glass and cobalt

What makes Jaipur blue pottery unique is its body. Unlike almost all other pottery, it contains no clay at all. The dough is made from quartz stone powder, powdered glass, borax, gum, and Multani mitti, or fuller's earth, with a natural gum called katira binding the mixture. The quartz gives the body its pale, almost white ground; the powdered glass melts in firing to form the glaze; and the borax and gum hold the fragile dough together long enough to be shaped. The colour comes from metal oxides, above all cobalt oxide, which produces the deep blue that gives the pottery its name, and copper oxide, which gives the turquoise and green tones that accompany it. The palette is completed by the white ground and accents in yellow, brown and a soft pink-red, but blue dominates, in shades from pale sky to a dark, almost inky cobalt.

The making, step by step

The making of blue pottery falls into four main phases, and a single product takes on average at least ten days to complete. First the dough is prepared: quartz powder, powdered glass, borax, gum and Multani mitti are kneaded into a soft, pliable mass. Because the mixture has no clay, it has little plasticity of its own, so shaping is done largely by hand and in moulds rather than on a potter's wheel, with the artisan pressing and smoothing the dough into plates, vases, bowls, tiles and figurines. The shaped pieces are left to dry thoroughly, and the base is scrubbed with sandpaper before painting, so the surface will take the colour cleanly.

Then comes the painting, done by hand with a fine brush, in cobalt oxide for the blues and copper oxide for the greens, with the design drawn directly onto the pale body. Once painted, the piece is coated with its glass-based glaze and fired in a kiln at up to about 850 degrees Celsius. The firing is the moment of truth: the glass melts into the glossy skin, the oxides bloom into their colours, and the piece is left in the kiln for a day to cool. The risk is total. If a piece emerges with a defect, it cannot be reworked; it has to be discarded, and the ten days of work go with it. Artisans say they never know how a piece will come out until the kiln is opened, which is why even experienced potters lose a share of every batch.

Motifs and the language of the design

The design language of Jaipur blue pottery is Persian in its bones and Rajasthani in its flowering. Arabesques and scrolling floral patterns, drawn from the Turko-Persian tradition, cover plates and vases in dense, rhythmic bands, while birds, animals, fish and stylised flowers fill the spaces between. Local motifs sit alongside them: peacocks, deer and elephants, and the Raja-Rani figures that appear on larger vases. The painting is freehand, and the brushwork is part of the beauty, with lines that vary in weight and colour that pools slightly where the brush lingers. The palette is disciplined: cobalt blue carries the design, turquoise and green provide the second voice, and white is the ground that lets both sing. Because the colour is painted onto the body before glazing, the glaze softens and deepens it, giving the finished surface a depth that printed decoration cannot match.

Revival and the GI tag

Blue pottery's survival is the work of a handful of people. After the decline that followed the end of royal patronage, the craft was revived in 1963 by the artist Kripal Singh Shekhawat, with support from cultural patrons including Maharani Gayatri Devi and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. Shekhawat re-established the techniques and trained a new generation. A second revival followed through Leela Bordia, who is credited with mainstreaming blue pottery commercially; her firm, Neerja International, became the largest manufacturer and exporter of the craft. Legal protection followed: Blue Pottery of Jaipur is registered under Geographical Indication Application No. 66, and it appears in the GI Registry's list of registrations for 2008-09. Many sources give 2009 as the registration year, while others cite 2008, a discrepancy reflecting the gap between the application and registration years in the registry's own records. Whichever year is quoted, the effect is the same: only pottery made in Jaipur by the traditional quartz-based method can properly use the name.

How to tell an authentic piece

An authentic piece of Jaipur blue pottery is recognisable first by what it is not: it is not clay. The body is quartz-based, so the piece feels light for its size, has a smooth, almost glassy white ground, and carries a hard, glossy glaze rather than the matte, earthy surface of terracotta. The decoration is hand-painted, so look for the slight variations of a brush line, the pooling of colour, and the small differences between two pieces of the same design. The blue should be a true cobalt, deep and clear, with turquoise and green companions, and the glaze should have depth, as if the colour were sitting under glass rather than printed on top of it. Buy from Jaipur workshops, the Government Handicrafts Emporium, or established makers such as Neerja International and Ram Gopal Blue Pottery, founded in 1993. Ask for the GI indication or the maker's mark, and be wary of pieces that are heavy, clay-bodied, or printed rather than painted.

Where the craft stands today

Blue pottery today is both a success story and a fragile one. It is Jaipur's most famous craft export, made in workshops across the city, sold in emporia and boutiques, and carried home by visitors from around the world. Support has come from institutions as well as individuals: NABARD Rajasthan and the Consortium for Industry Development and Awareness have backed artisan groups, including the workshops led by Kailash Prajapat and Ganesh Prajapat, who work with around seventy-five men and women artisans. The GI tag gives the craft a protected name. The fragility remains: the process is slow and loss-prone, with pieces discarded after firing, and machine-printed ceramics that imitate the blue-and-white look undercut genuine pieces on price. Yet the craft has already survived near-extinction once, and the revival that began in 1963 has held for more than sixty years.