“Making a ghatam is as painful as delivering a baby,” says K. Meenakshi, Sangeet Natak Akademy award (Puraskar) winner for 2013.
The Akademy has honoured the 61-year-old from Manamadurai, a potters’ town in Sivaganga district, for her contribution to instrument making – ghatam, an ancient percussion instrument of South India.
Meenakshi, whose life is confined to the town ever since her husband died in May 2005, says: “I do not know what the award is about or why they chose me. I have not done anything great,” she told The Hindu .
As the legend goes, she has been involved in the making of ghatams since she was 15, a year after she got married. She has been tapping mud pots for more than four and a half decades.
“As age is catching up, it is extremely painful,” she says. Hers is the only family making ghatam in Manamadurai for the past century.
“Not all pots we bake turn into ghatams,” she says. Only 40 per cent will come out with the desired tone and shruti and a few of them will be selected by vidwans.
At work, she taps the outer surface to ensure that the thickness is ‘even’ and produces the desired tone and ‘shruti’ after her son, U.V.K. Ramesh, the fourth generation artisan makes the clay pot with a narrow mouth.
It is a very strenuous and skilled work as she has to keep taping the outer wall for hours with one hand inside the pot holding on to a specially made heavy stone and the right hand with a flat wooden hammer on the outer surface.
Ramesh, a school dropout, is willing to teach the art to pot makers outside the family. But there are no takers.
The family tradition is all set to continue as the fifth generation in the family is getting ready with her grandson Hariharan, a class X student, being trained in the making of ghatams.
“I do not know what the award is about or why they chose me. I have not done anything great”
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