Status and Context: Sri Lankan Potter Women Reconsidered After Field Work in India

Abstract

In February 1989, in Pune, a city of a million people in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, I visited a simple outdoor pottery workshop. It consisted of a shallow pit kiln surrounded by eleven spaces shaded by gunny sacks on a flat area at the top of stairs leading down to a large river that ran through the city center. The families who used this space werekumbhars, members of a Hindu caste group found throughout the subcontinent. In India to teach, I thought that time spent with these potters might provide a perspective on Sinhalese potters I had known in a Sri Lankan village in the 1970s.The Indian potters were willing, so this first visit was followed by many more over the next four months.