IRA CHAUDHURI - A life in the day

IRA CHAUDHURI is a studio potter and ceramic artist who now lives in Delhi. She grew up in Tagore’s Visva Bharati, Santiniketan in West Bengal, where she studied art. She moved to Vadodara, then known as Baroda, in 1951 with her husband, the world-renowned sculptor Sankho Chaudhuri. At the newly founded Faculty of Fine Arts, she spent her time learning pottery in a tiny annex of the Sculpture Department. Thus began a prolific career marked by numerous exhibitions and a transformative impact on Indian pottery, as well as a stint heading the pottery courses at the very same Sculpture Department where she began. Even today, at 93, her zest for life is unmatched. Here she speaks with ANANYA PATEL.

- IRA CHAUDHURI

Q: To know Ira Chaudhuri is to know a true force of nature. Her vivacity is barely contained within her eclectically-dressed, interestingly-accessorized self, driven by an inventive mind and an intuition that searches out the beauty in everything around, underlined by her quintessential good humor and sharp wit. I had the good fortune of spending time alongside Iraba (“Granny Ira,” as I have always known her) at the Ceramic Center in Vadodara during the holidays, where even a few minutes in her company meant learning something new. Always aware and compelled by her presence on the other side of the room, I asked her the customary, “How did you get into ceramics?” Considering the course her career has taken, as is often the case with Iraba, her answer was quite unexpected.

I cannot claim that I was always fascinated by pottery. I was not. I trained to be a painter only to realize that I was not going to be one. When I married Sankho Chaudhuri and went to live in Baroda in 1951, I had no clue about pottery nor was I particularly interested.

Q: Despite this, she persisted in learning how to center a lump of clay on her own, which the teacher Punabhai deemed “not quite the thing for ladies,” and her curiosity led her to explore the possibilities of these new circumstances even beyond the walls of their little facility.