Day 7 India Land of the Tiger - Pottery and Painting

Local women in India working and preparing the clay ready to be cast or thrown into pots.

Today we went on a fantastic trip to a village about 30 minutes away which relies completely on making pottery for a living. The story behind the village and the pots is fascinating.

The village is surrounded by paddy fields - these are fields that grow rice. The fields are flooded with water for the rice plants to grow. This works perfectly here because they have what is called the monsoon season or the wet season, when a lot of rain falls for many days at a time. The river floods and deposits silt which is full of clay, into the fields. The soil is dug out ready to grow the rice plants.

Colourful saris form a fence that helps to fend off wild board from the home garden area. Beyond you can see paddy fields that have been harvested and with mounds of rice straw.

Because of the clay in the soil the villagers are able to reuse this in their pottery. Each family deposits their soil in front of their house and leaves it to dry. Then it is the job of the women to break up the lumps and tho sieve out the stones to make a fine powder which is the clay. Added back into water it becomes the clay they use to make their pots.

Local Indian woman uses a hammer to break down the clumps of soil to sieve out the clay.

Artist Joanne Short was invited to have a go at making a small clay pot on the potters wheel. See how she got on in our daily video.

The men then make the pots, some in the traditional way on a wheel and others pressing the clay into moulds. Many of the finished items are shipped out to sell across India. These are packaged for shipping using the stalks left over from the rice plants once the rice is harvested and are dried.

So this is the order of events -

Grow the rice to eat

Use the clay from the paddy field to make the pots

Use the straw from the rice plants to protect the pots and to feed the cattle who pull the ploughs to harvest the rice

It is such a fantastic sustainable way of life and has been going on in this village for many, many years. It was so interesting to see how these families all work together - grandmothers helping mothers and fathers working alongside grandfathers creating a whole family business.

On the way to this interesting village we drove along a major road that runs straight through the middle of the forest. Mandar explained to us that there has been a huge project funded by the government to raise the road in several places to create bridges for the wild animals to travel under to reach the other side of the forest. This has proved a great success and for sure has saved the life of many wild animals. There are still very serious problems with a big road like this so close to the Reserve. At one point our car swerved to avoid a very large langur monkey that jumped over the central reservation, and sadly further down the road we found a jackal that had been hit by a car and killed. Imagine how bad things would be if the bridges had not been put in place!

On the way home we took a different route where we drove through some of the most remote Gond villages and those closest to the jungle. We were stuck behind herds of cows and sheep for a lot of the way because all the farmers were bringing their livestock back home for the night before dark and the time the tigers come out to hunt - cattle are very easy prey for a big lazy cat!

For his last painting John chose to paint in another Gond village.

This Gond village was called Piparya. There were some really lovely colourful houses. John chose to paint a traditional old house with some really pretty red flowers growing on the roof.

Artist John Dyer painting a Gond village very close to the Tiger reserve of Pench with local children watching as he works.

He sat down to paint in front of a lovely green painted house. In front of the building there was a big tarpaulin covered in what looked like some sort of grain. Looking carefully I could see that it was in fact thousands of lentils! They were spread out to dry in the sun. Today was much hotter - 28 degrees centigrade in the shade! It felt very hot while I filmed John painting. In fact John’s paint was drying really quickly on the palette and brush so he had to paint very quickly.

The village was very quiet and Mandar pointed out that the women from the village would probably be out working in the fields at this time of day.

We were accompanied by Divyam Walke, Field Assistant (Pench) for the Satpuda Foundation who has been part of the team who have been looking after us this week. This is the village where he lives with his family.

Divyam is due to get married this year to his girlfriend who lives in the same village. She very kindly showed us around her house. He pointed out that the back half of the house is made of mud and is more than 50 years old. The house is very small but we could see that she was very proud to be showing us. It was so nice to be welcomed like this into someone’s home.

While John sat painting, the word got out amongst the village children who came out to watch. It was a lovely atmosphere because they watched virtually the whole time, quietly but very interested. All children, wherever they are in the world, love to watch someone paint. It was so special to see.

John Dyer pictured with Gond tribal children and holding his finished painting of a Gond village house in Piparya. The house belongs to the local postmaster. A safari 4x4 vehicle can be seen in the background. Many of the Gond villagers own or have loans for the 4x4 vehicles and depend on the safaris for their income.

Before we set out for the village a television journalist from NDTV in Nagpur came to do an interview - he wanted to hear all about the project Last Chance to Paint and what it was all about. He was very impressed with the whole idea of the project. He later came to the village to take some more video of John painting; it was perfect timing because the group of children had gathered around and he could see how well the project worked and they published a wonderful piece online and broadcast it across India.

I really enjoyed watching John doing this painting. It was lovely to see how interested the children were and how many people stopped to watch on their way past. The tiger rescue team truck went by and stopped to have a photo taken. They are a group of people who go to a wild animal’s rescue if they have been injured. They sedate them and transport them to a wild animal hospital. Injuries sometime occur from traps laid by poachers.

Watch the Day 7 video when it goes live: