Charma Kala: The Art of Leather Craft

From the tanning vats of medieval Varanasi to the export sheds of modern Kanpur, the story of India's most stigmatised and most underrated craft.

From the tanning vats of medieval Varanasi to the export sheds of modern Kanpur, the story of India's most stigmatised and most underrated craft.

A Shoemaker Who Sang

It is a cold winter dawn in Seer Govardhanpur, a small settlement on the southern edge of Varanasi, sometime in the late fifteenth century. A man sits on a low wooden bench in front of his one-room workshop. His name is Ravidas. On his knees lies a strip of buffalo leather, soaked the night before and softened by morning. In his right hand is a thin iron awl. A small bronze bowl of water, kept for softening his jute thread, catches the first light from the east.

Ravidas is making a sandal for a farmer from the next village. The farmer has already paid in a small measure of rice, and he will come back before the sun is high. The work itself is ordinary. Cut the sole, punch the holes, draw the thongs through, trim the edges. Ravidas has done this a thousand times. His fingers do not need to think.

What makes this morning different is the verse forming on his lips. A few Brahmins have stopped on the path outside his workshop. They are watching him. Their faces carry the polite distance that orthodox Varanasi reserved for a charmakara, a leather worker. Ravidas does not look up. Instead, he begins to sing softly. The verse he sings that morning, and hundreds of others like it, will eventually travel far beyond his workshop. Some will be written down. Some will enter the Guru Granth Sahib, the central scripture of the Sikhs. One line, known across north India even today, claims that if the mind is clean, then the Ganga itself flows inside a charmakara's tanning vessel. The sandal in his lap, the awl in his hand, and the verse on his lips are all the same offering.