Clay Pot Artist at work

Clay artist Adil Writer, formerly an architect of Mumbai, moved to Auroville in Tamil Nadu some years ago to pursue the arts and live amidst the unfamiliar Tamil language and script. He illustrated and fired the large earthen pot created in collaboration with Palaniswamy, a traditional terracotta artisan from Pudukkotai who makes the tall Ayanar horses placed outside villages as guardian deities.
Adil writes,
The imagery on the pot is rather simple... humanity holding hands, maybe languages holding hands too...the Tamil script is so fluid and sensuous.... one needs a lifetime to perfect it calligraphically. The large pot also has the Tamil version of Om on it...
Deborah Smith of Golden Bridge Pottery writes about his work, As well as red dots and smears, which he feels, make strong visual statements in his work, he is inspired by street architecture and roadside shrines in south India...where installation art is practiced daily...and innocuously... by simple people, with faith in their hearts and a light in their eyes...The red dot, draws the viewer into a centre where all things are purified in the presence of prayer and fire.
The Tamil script on the stoneware pot says inna seitharai oruthalavar naana nannayam seidhu vidal meaning, “to people who cause harm, shame them by returning it with good.” Palaniswamy thought his creations were enough to represent Tamil. He did not want to write on it. However, folk wisdom that teaches people how to face adversity, and quoted in India’s Parliament, coincidentally, on the very day the pot was ready for embellishment, inspired the potter, the ceramist, and a local Tamil teacher to collaborate to inscribe this message on the pot.