Nikhil Pal, 69, the ninth generation of his family, has been working in the pottery industry for the last 52 years. He started this work with his father when he was 17 years old. But his son doesn’t want to continue with this profession because of the hard work and lack of money. On the other hand, there is no social value.
“Pottery is not only a profession to us but also it’s an emotion. Because our ancestors did the same work,” said Nikhil Pal. “Because of not getting support and facilities from the government, we are going to lose our profession.” Not only Nikhil but also many people like him are also going to lose this traditional work.
Pal is a resident of Sherpur Upazila in the Bogura district in Bangladesh. There was a community, which was commonly known as Pal, which was involved with pottery. In these areas, at least 25 to 30 families were making clay-made cookware, kitchenware, money banks, etc. but now only three families are involved with pottery and the next generations of this community are involved with different professions.
The members of the community shared with me the problems that they are facing nowadays. One of them is the scarcity of raw material sources. It needs special clay for making pottery, known as Atel (Clayey soil) in Bangladesh. To collect this clay they have to dig five to seven feet inside the land. A few decades ago they collected it without any cost. But now they have to pay 30 to 35 thousand takas and it takes nearly two hundred takas per maund for buying wood as fuel. On the other hand, in recent times the government also applied some rules and regulations for digging soil. Now it is totally restricted to dig agricultural land without any permission from the government.
“If people want to dig the soil with a valid reason then we will consider it, but they have to get permission from the Upazila administration,” told Sanjida Sultana, Upazila Nirbahi Officer of Sherpur, Bogura. “Most of the time people illegally cut the forest and dig the land.”
At least three hundred people from Aria Bazar village in Bogura District were involved in pottery. They told me that they have no Union to uphold these issues to the concerned authority. Most of the time people take loans from NGOs with a high rate of interest. So they cannot make a balance between the investment and profit. “As a local representative I always try to help them but they are not united which is one of the reasons they are far behind in getting different types of facilities from the government,” told Md. Rafikul Islam, a member of the local government.
Labour cost is also very high at this time. They take six to seven hundred takas per day. So after going through this process when they sell products to the market, they get only a little profit. They sell curd cups of only two taka each piece, which contain 80 grams of curd and the price of a curd plate is eight takas per piece. But they spend more time and energy in this work.
“People who have more children or extended family can get help from their family members,” said Ajoy Pal who is involved in this profession after the liberation war of Bangladesh.
Ajay has six members in his family. His three sons have also been doing the same work for the last two decades. But now they are planning to change their profession because of poor income.
Even in the 1990s, it was common to see vendors traveling from house to house in rural Bangladesh selling items made of clay, such as money banks, cookware, and other household items. But now people are comfortable using plastic and aluminum products. In Bangladesh, people from Manikganj, Savar, Bogura, Cumilla, and Moulovibazar districts are primarily involved with pottery. According to Bangladesh’s English daily newspaper The Business Standard, in Bangladesh, there were over 680 villages devoted to creating pottery, and close to 500,000 individuals created art using clay. “However, over the past 20 years, the number has fallen. In recent years, we failed to locate more than 350 pottery villages,” the report said.
Chondijan, another village in the Bogura district, has at least 70 families involved with pottery. People from this village are saying that they sell most of the products in the nearest district. But now the demand for clay materials is very low.
It’s a tradition in Bangladesh that people celebrate the Bengali new year named ‘Pohela Boishakh’ by eating Hilsha fish – which is the national fish of Bangladesh – with fermented rice that is served on a clay plate. “Only during these seasons there is a demand for clay materials like dolls, home decor, etc because of the village fair,” Sumit Pal, who lives in Chandijan village, said. “But other times there is a demand for ‘Doi sora’ (a bowl used to make curd).”
There is no accurate data that how many people are involved in this community. Sometimes the local government can provide some data but centrally there is not any clear information. I talked with SME Foundation Bangladesh.” most of the time we try to provide loans for small businesses and we also arrange different types of SME fairs in different places of Bangladesh but we have no actual data about how many people are involved in the pottery community”, told Morshedul Islam, public relations officer of SME Foundation Bangladesh. Even many students of the ceramics department from fine arts faculty in different universities have no research about this community. BRAC is one of the biggest NGOs in Bangladesh that buys a huge amount of clay products for sale through its biggest selling center which is known as Aarong Bangladesh. But they have no central research about pottery.
