Khilona Parampara: India's Toy-Making Heritage
The Chisel and the Aale Mara
Bavas Miyan presses the chisel against the spinning aale mara wood. Shavings curl off like saffron. Around him, the workshop smells of lac sticks melting against friction heat, that sweet burnt-sugar scent every Channapatna boy grows up breathing. He is turning a toy horse. Not for an order. For no one.
Behind him, stacked against a whitewashed wall, are eighty unsold wooden elephants and train engines from last month. Chinese plastic toys have arrived at the Ramanagara bus stand in cardboard cartons. They cost eight rupees each. Bavas Miyan's hand-turned wooden elephant, dipped five times in lac and polished with kewra leaf, takes three days to make and sells for twenty. Two hundred families in Channapatna still depend on the lathe. Three of those families have already sent their sons to Bengaluru for security guard jobs.
The craft is five generations old in Bavas Miyan's own family. He does not know it yet, but in seventeen years Channapatna will receive the first Geographical Indication tag ever granted to a handicraft in Karnataka. He does not know that his unsold horses will one day sit in Crate and Barrel store windows in San Francisco. Right now he just keeps turning.
The Oldest Toys In The World
India has been making toys longer than almost anyone. That fact still startles people. When archaeologists brushed the dust off Mohenjo-daro and Lothal in the 1920s and 1930s, they found something no one had expected. Buried among seals and cooking pots and beads, in the rooms where children had slept four thousand five hundred years ago, they found toys.
- Terracotta bullock carts with working wheels
- Miniature clay cattle and sheep
- A monkey with jointed arms that slid down a string
- Whistling birds of baked clay
- Spinning tops and rattles