Louise Allison Cort at Akar Prakar in Calcutta and (below) the cover of her Temple Potters of Puri

The clay tea cup, the modest bhanr we randomly toss away when empty, “has to be the most beautiful clay utensil of daily use!” “They are like flowers. So light and delicate!” said Louise Allison Cort at the Akar Prakar art gallery in Calcutta recently. And she should know.

A curator of Asian ceramics at the Smithsonian Institution, where she has been working since 1981, Cort is the author of Shigaraki, Potters’ Valley and numerous scholarly articles on historical and contemporary ceramics in Japan, South Asia and Southeast Asia.

On July 16, however, she was talking of Temple Potters of Puri, a book she has co-authored with Purna Chandra Mishra.

The hardbound title with 268 photographs, 30 drawings, three maps and a DVD, priced at Rs 3,500, was launched by Mapin Publishing in 2012. It is the first in-depth study on this group of temple servants.

At the Akar Prakar session presided over by Jadavpur University professor Swapan Chakravorty, Cort spoke passionately about her field research of 1979 to 1981, when she and Mishra had scoured Puri gathering material for their book. They learnt about the Kurala Purana, which relates how the 300 Kumbhara Bishois or potter servants of the Jagannatha Temple were assigned their sacred duties by Vishnu himself.

The potter’s wheel is seen by them as a replica of Vishnu’s chakra and the paddle with which they beat the sides of the clay pot to make them thin yet durable is to them the mace or gada of Vishnu. The facets on the pots for mahaprasad are similarly representative of the 108 petals of Vishnu’s lotus.

The fact that every day hundreds and hundreds of pots — some large enough to hold mahaprasad rice for 60 people at a time — were made exactly in the same way using the same designs and techniques over the ages is “remarkable”, feels Cort.

That they must all be uniformly red after firing to be accepted for a single use in the temple kitchen was to her mind akin to the lesser-known elite Japanese tradition of using freshly baked earthenware that could be disposed of after one use. “Instead of differences in the earthenware of the Asian countries, it is the similarities that are more significant,” she said.

This time she was on her way to Puri again to find out how conditions and conventions had changed over time. Has the design of the pots changed in any way? Are the Kumbhara Bishois still the sole suppliers of the earthenware containers used in the Jagannatha Temple? Or have machines and plastic made inroads?

A week later, after returning to Washington DC, Cort wrote to The Telegraph of her disappointment.

“Sadly, the Kumbhara Bishois have lost their exclusive right to provide the clay pots for the Jagannatha temple and now compete with ordinary potters from other villages around Puri. The cause is the economic drive on the part of the temple administration to reduce monetary costs, at the cost of the loss of centuries-old temple tradition.”