Bidriware & Pembarthi: Inlay Arts of the Deccan
A black metal alloy that only turns black when rubbed with the soil of one specific fort, a Telangana village hammering the same brass motifs it made for the Kakatiya kings, and the small artisan families who still hold both secrets.
In a kirkhana in the Chaubara quarter of Bidar, northern Karnataka, a seventh-generation Bidri master named Shah Rasheed Ahmed Quadri inlays pure silver wire, drawn to the thickness of a hair, into the black surface of a zinc-copper vase. The black is not paint. It is a chemical colour that only appears when the metal is rubbed with a paste made from the soil inside the Bidar fort walls. For nearly six hundred years, no other soil on the subcontinent has produced the same permanent matt black. Three hundred kilometres east, in Pembarthi village in Jangaon district of Telangana, a community of Vishwakarma brass artisans has been hammering repousse sheet metal since the Kakatiya kings ruled the Deccan in the thirteenth century. This lesson walks into both traditions: the Bahmani and Barid Shahi Persianate workshops of Bidar, the Kakatiya-era brass workshops of Pembarthi, the 2006 Bidriware GI and the 2010 Pembarthi Metal Craft GI, and the contemporary designer and direct-to-buyer channels (Eina Ahluwalia jewellery, iTokri online retail) that are now keeping both crafts alive.
A Lane in Bidar
In a narrow lane in the Chaubara quarter of Bidar, in the far north of Karnataka, on a summer afternoon in the late 2010s, Shah Rasheed Ahmed Quadri sits cross-legged on the cool stone floor of his workshop. In his left hand is a small black metal vase. In his right hand is a fine steel chisel, no bigger than a pen. Next to him on a low wooden tray is a coil of pure silver wire, drawn to the thickness of a strand of hair.
His hands move without pause. He cuts a groove shaped like the petal of a poppy into the black surface of the vase, lays the silver wire into the groove, and taps it flat with a small hammer. His grandfather taught him this work when he was a boy. His grandfather's grandfather learned it from his own father, and so on back through seven generations of the Quadri family, all the way to the court of the Bahmani Sultans of Bidar in the fifteenth century.
The black vase in his hand is not painted. It is not dyed. The black is a chemical colour that appears only on a specific alloy of zinc and copper, and only when it is rubbed with a paste made from the dark soil inside the walls of the Bidar fort. No other soil on the subcontinent gives the same matt, permanent black. For nearly six hundred years, this secret has travelled through this one small town, from master to apprentice, and almost nowhere else. In 2015, the Government of India awarded Shah Rasheed the Padma Shri for keeping the secret alive.
Three hundred kilometres to the east, in a village called Pembarthi in Jangaon district of Telangana, a second Deccan metal tradition has survived just as long, and in just as small a geography. The artisans of Pembarthi do not work with silver on black. They work with brass sheet, hammering floral and figurative designs into thin metal panels that once decorated the temple chariots and the wooden gates of the Kakatiya kings, and that now decorate the homes of urban Indian collectors and the lobbies of Hyderabad hotels.