Clay to glass: 3 artisan clusters in city make strides towards GI tag

Uttam Nagar's terracotta potters, Seelampur's woodcarvers and Sangam Vihar's bead artisans are now on track to get long overdue official recognition

- Jasjeev Gandhiok and Gargi Shukla

At Uttam Nagar, flower pots remain the best-sellers, especially those shaped as animals (right). But the craftsmen here still rely on word-of-mouth advertising.

(SANCHIT KHANNA/HT)

It is the crack of dawn in Uttam Nagar's Prajapati Colony the potters' village-and 30-year-old Kehar Singh is already at work. A truck has rumbled in from Faridabad, delivering more than two tonnes of fresh clay, enough to sustain his work for the month.

His mother is awake too, seated on the cool earthen floor with a mound of clay beside her. With movements that look almost ritualistic, she presses her fingers deep into the wet mass, folding and turning it in a way others knead dough. As the wheel spins, she raises her hands and coaxes the clay upward. It widens, narrows, curves and soon transforms into a vase with a slender, graceful neck. In a few days, after hardening and baking, that vase will join the others displayed outside their home, waiting for a buyer.

The family has been doing this for three generations. They are among more than 400 families in the settlement who have shaped terracotta in this neighbourhood since the 1970s. Recently, Singh learned something that made his work feel heavier with meaning: Uttam Nagar's terracotta craft is on its way to receiving a "Geographical Indication (GI)" tag-making it one of three unique crafts selected from Delhi for this recognition, alongside Sangam Vihar's glass bead jewellery and Seelampur's handcrafted woodwork. For a city that, until now, had only one GI tag - basmati rice, shared with several northern states this decision marks a long-overdue acknowledgment of the Capital's own artisanal traditions.

Singh said the tag is more just a than a label for them. "If people across India know our work is special, they will value it more. It may finally bring us the respect and the price our art deserves."