Heart Of Clay

From the ‘abode of the Godmakers’, the distinctive characteristic of the soil used in idol-making is more than just raw material; it is an amalgam of an ancient history that the earth holds

- Suzanne Mcneill

Dispersed among the outdoor restaurants, furniture showrooms and kids’ resorts that line Chennai’s southbound East Coast Road are several garden centers. I found one I liked and visited often, drawn by the range of plants that at home I know as houseplants but which in tropical Chennai grow abundantly outside. Marshaled into strict rows were great swathes of purple bougainvillea, ornamental figs, coral-colored anthurium, and great stripy-leaved Dracaena, all planted up in the same dark red soil characteristic of this part of Tamil Nadu. The quality of that soil puzzled me. At home we fuss enormously about the structure of our garden soil, about feeding it, aerating it, tending its pH levels. This stuff was like planting in thick mud, yet everything thrived in it, even the Italian basil seeds I brought from home and germinated and grew on my balcony.

That red soil is characteristic of much of South and Northeast India, formed from the weathering of rocks high in iron oxide. Twentieth-century soil studies have classified India’s soils into eight major types: laterite, mountain and desert, black and red, alluvial, saline and peat, though, as in so many areas of Indian life, soils had been codified in much earlier times and their 12 types written down in a fourth century CE Sanskrit lexicon called the Amara Kosha. These categories included fertile (urvara), barren (usara), muddy (pankila) and grassy (sadvala). Other types are poetic in their classification: sarkara was ‘land full of pebbles and pieces of limestone’, whilst nadimatrika was ‘land watered from a river’.