Inside Auroville's Mandala Pottery and ceramic studio

I love making tea bowls,” says Adil Writer, ceramic artist at Mandala Pottery, a pottery studio in Auroville.

We’re in front of a large wall shelf at Mandala Pottery, lined with tea bowls and pots in various shapes and colours—artistic, beautiful, unusual, familiar, whimsical. I met Writer at the launch of a tea room in Auroville. Finding a tea lover, who also makes teaware, I was keen to chat. Also because, in seeking a side-handle kyusu some time ago, the only locally made one I found was from the Mandala collection.

Puducherry has long been a pottery town. There is a deep tradition of terracotta here, and also an influential school of stoneware that began with the arrival of American ceramic artists Deborah Smith and Ray Meeker. Their Golden Bridge Pottery, started in 1971, shaped a school of pottery that is philosophically grounded in the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and aesthetically global, in that Puducherry-Auroville way.

Writer arrived here 28 years ago from Mumbai to study ceramics at Golden Bridge and never left.

There are two streams of production at Mandala Pottery: Studio Mandala, which creates original and commissioned ceramic art, and Mandala Pottery, a line of functional ware. Teaware straddles both worlds, at times functional, and sometimes, sculptural. Like tea itself, each piece comes with a story.

The Japanese side-handle teapot kyusu is inspired by a host who loved to make side-handled pots. Writer shows me one where he has filled the hollow handle with tiny pebbles, so it gives a soft rattle when you pour. There’s the gaiwan, the “selfish teapot” as he calls it, referring to its suitability for solo tea drinking.

But it’s when I hold an unusually shaped cup with indentations for the fingers, tilt the rattling kyusu, or study the mottled orange tea bowls that are Mandala’s signature soda-fired ware, that I appreciate how our teaware story has been quietly evolving, even as the tea story itself has.

I ask Writer about his own tea rituals. He talks about growing up in a Parsi home where lemongrass and mint found their way into chai, about discovering green tea a decade ago, and about a small tea grower in Coonoor whose green tea he now carries wherever he goes.

The shift in people seeking the more contemporary forms of teaware, still only in the last decade or so, unsurprisingly, parallels the growing adoption of green tea.

We talk of tea traditions, his travels and experiences at tea ceremonies from China to Japan and Korea, where every choreographed step gives the teaware a defined, almost sacred role. And then he speaks of younger tea drinkers who shrug off such strictures in favour of a more relaxed, intuitive approach.

Somehow, I see both these ideas at work at Mandala—teaware that acknowledges the traditional form, and another line that seems to gleefully break every rule in the book.

1001 Teas is a fortnightly series about the many stories hidden in the world of tea. Aravinda Anantharaman (@AravindaAnanth1) is a tea drinker, writer and editor.