A coppersmith’s tale
Last month as I was browsing products produced by craftspeople at a buyer-seller meet organised by the District Industries Centre, Almora, I discovered that the tiny copper pots my grandmother used in her pooja room decades ago, were still being made here. Some things, I mused, didn’t go out of fashion. Or did they? A chat later with Navin Kumar Tamta, who made these products, made me realise how imperative innovation and research and development (R&D) are for the survival of traditional crafts.
Tamta invited me to the Tamta mohalla, the traditional enclave of coppersmiths and off I went through Almora’s labyrinth of steep lanes and stairways following the sweet clanging sound of the hammer hitting metal. In a sunny workshed with several hearths, Tamta and three others sat hammering discs of copper into deep bowls. These would be welded later with flattened rings to get their trademark round shape. Each of these took a day to make — an awful lot of work for a water pot. “It is,” Tamta agreed, when I commented on this, “but what to do? My market is local, and this is what my customers want.” I wandered around to see what else was being produced here. Other than water pots, these coppersmiths basically made vessels for traditional use. “We’re also making light but fancy items for ritual use, which are cheaper and more in demand,” he said.
He earned between ~300 to ~600 a day, depending on the season. “The business used to be much better earlier,” he remarked. “Now people in Almora are modernising and don’t use these traditional vessels as much. Also the copperware market has been taken over by cheaper machine-made products.” Times were tough, with ever-increasing high transportation and raw material costs. Consequently, this traditional craft is slowly dying out. There was a time, Tamta said, when one could hear the sound of copper being hammered in every single house in the Tamta mohalla. “Today, barely a dozen coppersmiths are left in this area,” he rued. His own children have shown no interest in taking the family’s traditional skill forward. “I have a son studying in the local polytechnic and two more who are in school,” he said. “They’re modern children who dream of a life and livelihood that is better than this.”
“I think that the way forward is to somehow access online markets,” Tamta said, musing that there were only that many water pots he could sell locally. I agreed, even though I couldn’t really see copper water pots having much of a demand on Amazon and Flipkart. Perhaps he should think of diversifying his product range and making it relevant to non-local audiences first, I suggested. “R&D costs more money than I have to spare right now,” he said. “Perhaps I should try selling online first, make some money and then spend that on developing new products.”
It was the classic chicken and egg argument that could go on endlessly. Instead, I bought a heavy metal pot for the kitchen, knowing I’d rarely use it. And that was when I realised that until craftspeople are able to make more products we can actually use, they’re slowly going to go out of business, dreaming of an elusive online market that’s always, somehow out of their reach.