Dhokra & Bell Metal: Tribal Casting Arts

The 4,500-Year-Old Wax Thread That Still Runs Through Bastar and Bankura

Meet the Ghadwa metalsmiths of Bastar, the Karmakar families of Bikna, and the kamsari households of Sarthebari and Mannar. Learn how a length of beeswax thread, a clay core, and a kiln of cow-dung cakes carry a casting tradition from the Mohenjo-daro Dancing Girl in 2500 BCE to a Padma Shri master in Kondagaon, and meet the brands and institutions keeping the wax winding alive today.

A Courtyard in Kondagaon

In the winter of 1982, in a courtyard in Kondagaon, a small town in the Bastar forests of what is now Chhattisgarh, a thirty-three year old Ghadwa metalsmith named Jaidev Baghel sat cross-legged on the packed earth and rolled a thin worm of beeswax between his palms. The wax was the colour of ripe mango. The clay core in front of him, shaped into the rough body of a horse, was still warm from the morning sun. In his hand was a length of waxed thread no thicker than a piece of grass. He was about to wind it, ring after ring, around the body of the horse. When he finished, the horse would be dressed in a coat of fine wax lace. None of the lace would survive. All of it would matter.

A few weeks earlier, Jaidev had been invited to a place he had never been: Bharat Bhavan, the new state museum in Bhopal that the painter Jagdish Swaminathan had founded that year. Swaminathan had done something India's art world had never done before. He had hung the work of Bastar's tribal metalsmiths and Madhubani's village painters on the same walls, in the same gallery, as the canvases of Delhi's modern oil painters. In Bhopal, Jaidev's horses had sat at eye level beside paintings worth ten times their price. He came home knowing two things he had not known before. The first was that what his family did was art, not just craft. The second was that almost nobody in Delhi understood how it was actually made.

So today, in his courtyard, he was teaching three of his nephews the only step nobody could shortcut: how to wind the wax thread.

What 'Dhokra' actually means

The word Dhokra (sometimes spelled Dokra) comes from the Dhokra Damar, a group of nomadic tribal metalsmiths who have moved for centuries across the eastern belt of India. Their old caravan routes ran through what is today Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha and West Bengal. Wherever they stopped to camp, they cast small bronze figures for the local Adivasi villages: tribal gods, hunting horses, dancing women, weighing scales, oil lamps, hair pins. Then they moved on.