Ira Chaudhuri next to a bronze portrait of Indira Gandhi by her late husband. Picture by Sanjoy Chattapadhyaya

After Sankho Chaudhuri died last year in Delhi at 90, his widow kept herself occupied by organising an exhibition of pieces, which were waiting to be forged or cast during the celebrated sculptor’s illness and were given shape to by Chandrakant Bhatt, who was his student.

The widow, Ira Chaudhuri, was in town for the opening of her husband’s exhibition at the Seagull Arts & Centre Resource Centre, on Friday evening.

She turns out to be a tiny lady, and in spite of her name as pioneering potter, there is nothing formidable about her. Wearing what she described as a “designer” sari to her formidable nieces who surrounded her, she could be anybody’s grandmother, whose favourite pastime would be pottering about her home.

Like most matter-of-fact people, she herself would not rate her achievements as being any more than that. She is a potter first and last.

Ira Devi, whose works were last seen here with her husband’s in the late 1980s at Chitrakoot Gallery, says “linguistically I am a Gujarati” (she also speaks flawless Bengali) and a Zoroastrian by faith, and although she does not practise it, she admits that the “ethnicity” is there. With the typical self-deprecatory humour of her people, she says Parsis were always “very visible”, though “counted in numbers they were never more than a couple of hundreds”.

Her father, Jehangir Vakil, used to teach English at Santiniketan between 1924 and 1929. She was born in Calcutta in 1927, because “no arrangements for child birth existed in Santiniketan in those days.” Adi Gazder, the paediatrician and gifted pianist of Calcutta, was her distant nephew.

Ira Devi went to the school founded by her father in Hyderabad and Pune, which Indira Gandhi attended. After her Intermediate in Mumbai she joined Kala Bhavan. When she went to Baroda in 1951 all that the ceramic department could boast was the potter.

Ira Devi was no natural potter. She had no fascination for clay either. She knew precious little about pottery. “I started willy nilly. Once I got into it I was addicted. I am not a very strong-willed person. I gave up and took it up once again.”

Gradually a kiln was introduced and Basab Kumar Barua, who had studied pottery in London, joined Baroda and the department developed. But Ira Devi’s first one-person show happened in 1979 at Garhi when they shifted to Delhi.

Pottery has always been neglected. Except for Varanasi, no full-fledged course exists anywhere. In Baroda it is at best an elective subject. Things which have utility are taken for granted. “Pottery is like shopping — I need a bowl… I buy one,” she says. Which is why she discourages those who take it up as a casual hobby as no equipment is easily available.

Pottery was born in China, says Ira Devi, but after the Cultural Revolution it was all destroyed. “They are copying antiques. They don’t have any good potters. Yet they taught pottery to the whole world,” she says resignedly.

She stresses that India has no indigenous tradition of glazed pottery perhaps because of the concept of “ento” which disallows the re-use of utensils out of which one has eaten unless these are scoured. Which is why, perhaps, bhands are smashed after a single use. Blue pottery of Rajasthan is only post-Mughal.

Ira Devi is glad that of late there is more appreciation of studio pottery and pieces are fetching better prices. Some sculptors like Jyotsna Bhatt are using pottery techniques to happy effect. And now after five years of illness, Ira Devi is back at the kiln.