Kumbham Murals

As modernity and liberalization ruthlessly sweep into dusty corners the lives of hundreds and thousands of artisans, stray recovery instances are beginning to stand out as milestones.

Instances of Craft yielding its rightful place in human existence to the mindless forces of the market abound around us. Remarkable, therefore, is the story of an artisan village recapturing the craft they had almost lost, and redefining it for the contemporary world.

What began as a quest for identity or authenticity or even redemption of the self, led to the crystallization of �Kumbham�: an initiative with a two-fold concern. On the one hand, the search for the lost cultural roots of people like myself, who have been systematically stripped of our innate sensibilities through a process of formal education while on the other hand, simultaneously engaging a community of potters in a continuing experiment to give the traditional pottery to the new and varied needs of an urban market, grown from within their traditional repositories of knowledge.