“You should just spend the afternoon walking around Kumartuli.”
“Sure thing. What is that?”
Kumartuli is Kolkata’s pottery district. You step into a relatively quiet part of town where doors are close by each other and open up into long, narrow workshops. You can peer into each one, and when you do you’ll see statues, busts, and sculptures all in different stages of creation.
Some will simply have their structure made of dried reeds exposed. Others will have the clay packed on them, made of mud from the Hooghly River. The ones that have dried might be getting a coat of paint applied.
With a big religious festival along the way, most of the artisans here are working under a crunch to meet the demand for all the Hindu deities and local legends people need sculpted.
The sculptors were kind and welcoming, letting me hop into their workshops and browse the impressive array of statues, even though they had to remain focused on getting the next one made. In a full, busy city, this was a nice calm spot with a lot to be wowed by.