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Chapter 6: Thread, Stone, Leaf
In a dim concrete room in Kardola village, Bargarh district, a woman named Sushila Meher sits cross-legged on the floor, tying knots. Not decorative knots, not idle knots. Each one is a pixel. She is programming a saree.
The yarn is stretched taut on a frame before her, and she works along its length with a speed that looks careless but is not. Each knot she ties with a thin strip of plastic will resist the dye bath that comes next. Where the knot sits, the original color of the yarn will remain. Where it does not, the yarn will absorb red, or black, or deep maroon. When the tying is finished, the yarn is dyed, the knots are untied, and the thread carries a coded pattern of color along its length — a pattern that will only become visible when the yarn is woven into cloth.
This is bandha. Tie-dye resist on yarn, not cloth. The pattern exists in the thread before the fabric exists at all. Think of it as pre-compilation: the design is specified at the material level, baked into the medium itself, not applied on top. And if a single knot is misplaced by a fraction of a centimeter, the pattern that emerges on the finished cloth will stutter. There is no undo.
Sushila has been doing this since she was twelve. Her mother did it. Her grandmother did it. The Meher community of western Odisha — also called Bhulia — has carried this knowledge for centuries, passed not through manuals or schools but through the daily rhythm of household production. Her husband will do the actual weaving on the pit loom in the next room. Her daughter, if she stays in the village, will learn the tying. If she leaves for Surat or Bangalore, the knot will not be tied.
Odisha is one of India’s densest concentrations of living craft traditions. Not museum traditions. Not revivalist projects. Living ones, where the person making the object today is a direct descendant — often literally — of the person who made it three hundred years ago. Sambalpuri ikat, Bomkai weaving, Kotpad vegetable-dyed textiles, Habaspuri saris, Khandua temple cloth, Pattachitra painting, palm-leaf manuscript illustration, silver filigree, Pipili applique, Dhokra lost-wax casting, bell-metal utensils, stone sculpture. Name a material — thread, stone, leaf, metal, silver, cloth — and Odisha has a hereditary community that has been shaping it for generations.
Why here? Three forces converged. First, the temple economy: from the eighth century onward, the great temples of Bhubaneswar, Puri, and Konark created continuous demand for cloth, sculpture, painting, metal work, and ritual objects. Where there is a temple, there is a procession. Where there is a procession, there is a canopy, a chariot cover, a painted scroll, a silver ornament. The Jagannath temple at Puri alone sustains multiple craft traditions — the Khandua weavers of Nuapatna who weave the deity’s ritual garments, the Pattachitra painters of Raghurajpur who paint the Anasara Patti during the deity’s annual retreat, the applique makers of Pipili who cover the chariots for Rath Yatra. Second, hereditary caste specialization: the Tanti and Meher weavers, the Chitrakara painters, the Kansari bell-metal workers, the Maharana stone carvers, the Darji applique tailors — each community’s identity was fused to its craft for centuries. You were born into your material. Third, geographic isolation: Odisha’s relative remoteness from the main arteries of colonial industrial disruption meant that factory-made substitutes arrived later here than in Bengal or Maharashtra. What the railways and Manchester textiles destroyed in other regions by the 1870s, Odisha’s handloom traditions survived into the twentieth century, battered but not extinct.
This chapter is about what those hands make, how they make it, and whether anyone can afford to keep making it.
Sambalpuri Textiles — The Tie-Dye Mathematics
The word bandha means “to tie.” The Sambalpuri textile tradition is built on this single act — tying sections of yarn to resist dye — repeated thousands of times with mathematical precision to produce patterns that exist not on the surface of the cloth but within its very structure.
Here is how it works. The weaver (or more often, the weaver’s wife and children) begins with a design graph. This graph maps the intended pattern — say, a row of shankha (conch shell) motifs alternating with chakra (wheel) motifs along the border of a saree. The graph tells the tyer exactly which sections of which yarns must be tied before each dye bath. The tying is done on a frame where the yarns are stretched to their full length, aligned exactly as they will be arranged on the loom. Each knot is placed at a specific point along the yarn. When the tied yarns are immersed in dye, the tied portions resist the color. After dyeing, the knots are untied, and the yarn now carries alternating segments of dyed and undyed color.
The process is repeated for each color in the design. A three-color pattern means three rounds of tying and dyeing. A complex Sambalpuri saree with five or six colors in its pallav can take weeks of tying alone before the loom is ever threaded.
What makes this mathematically demanding is that the pattern on the yarn must account for the shrinkage and tension of weaving. The distance between color changes on the thread must precisely correspond to the width of the design element as it will appear on the finished cloth. A miscalculation of even a few millimeters compounds across hundreds of threads to produce a blurred or misaligned motif. This is why the most skilled tyers in Bargarh can look at a yarn on a frame and see the saree that does not yet exist.
In single ikat, either the warp (lengthwise) or the weft (crosswise) yarn is tie-dyed. In double ikat, both warp and weft are tie-dyed before weaving, and the weaver must align the two sets of patterned threads so that their color changes coincide precisely at the intersection point. Double ikat is among the most technically demanding textile processes in the world — it is practiced in only three places globally: Gujarat (Patola), Odisha (Sambalpuri), and Bali (Geringsing). The Pasapali pattern, Sambalpuri’s famous chess-board design, is a double ikat — both warp and weft are dyed in alternating dark and light segments so that they produce a grid of contrasting squares when woven. The name itself derives from pasa, the ancient dice game of the Mahabharata. The Pandavas lost a kingdom over a chess-board; the Meher weavers of Bargarh build one thread by thread.
The motifs are not decorative accidents. The shankha (conch shell) is the sacred symbol of Vishnu, representing purity and the primordial sound of Om. The chakra (wheel) evokes dharma, cosmic order, the wheel of the Konark Sun Temple, the Sudarshana Chakra of Vishnu. The phula (flower), particularly the lotus, stands for Lakshmi, abundance, fertility. Fish motifs reference the rivers of western Odisha. Temple designs reproduce the shikhara outlines of Kalinga architecture. Earlier, these textiles were offered to local deities — Ishtadevata — as acts of devotion, and the motifs were prayers encoded in thread.
The geography of Sambalpuri weaving stretches across western Odisha. Bargarh district is the heart — villages like Kardola, Jhilimunda, Barpali, and Barahaguda are weaving settlements where the rhythmic clack of the pit loom is as constant as birdsong. Sonepur, Boudh, and parts of Sambalpur district also produce Sambalpuri textiles, though Bargarh dominates. The weekly handloom market at Balijuri in Bargarh is the industry’s central nervous system — every Friday, wholesalers, retailers, and agents gather, and the market serves as the lifeline for roughly 10,000 weavers, merchants, and their families.
But Sambalpuri is not the only textile tradition in the state, and the differences matter.
Bomkai, from the village of the same name in Ganjam district, uses a different technique. While it incorporates ikat-dyed yarns, the distinctive feature of Bomkai is supplementary weft work — extra threads are woven into the fabric over and above the structural weft to create raised, textured motifs on the border and pallav. The supplementary weft is inserted manually: the weaver lifts specific warp threads by hand and places the extra weft thread across, creating motifs of animals, birds, temples, and geometric forms that stand slightly above the surface of the cloth. A Bomkai saree takes twelve to fourteen days to weave. It received its GI tag in 2012.
Habaspuri, from Habaspur village in Kalahandi district, is a tradition born under different patronage. Where Sambalpuri weaving was sustained by western Odisha’s market towns, Habaspuri was patronized by the local kings of Kalahandi and woven by the Bhulia Meher weavers of Chichaiguda and Baldhiamal. Its motifs — Kumbha (temple), fish, flowers, turtle, and tribal wall art — reflect the Kondh tribal aesthetic of the region. The craft declined after the fall of dynastic rule and was later revived by master weaver Ugrasen Meher. But the numbers tell a grim story: from over 4,000 weavers in its heyday, the tradition now has roughly 250 practitioners.
Kotpad, from Koraput district in southern Odisha, is perhaps the most distinctive of all. Woven by the Mirgan tribal community, Kotpad textiles are dyed exclusively with natural vegetable dyes — specifically the root of the aal tree (Aachhu Gachi in the local tongue), which produces a deep, earthy maroon that is the fabric’s signature color. No chemical dye touches the cloth. The process is slow and painstaking: aal roots are boiled, the yarn soaked repeatedly over days, each immersion deepening the color. The motifs are drawn from tribal cosmology — geometric abstractions of nature, kinship patterns, ritual symbols. Kotpad was the first product from Odisha to receive a GI tag, in 2005. The cloth is organic before organic was a marketing term.
Khandua, from Nuapatna and Maniabandha in Cuttack district, carries perhaps the greatest ritual weight of any Odia textile. Khandua is the cloth of Jagannath. Special varieties are woven as ritual garments for the deities at the Puri temple — a yellow Khandua for Jagannath (symbolizing salvation), a green one for Balabhadra (life and peace), a red one for Subhadra (shakti). Verses from the Gita Govinda — Jayadeva’s twelfth-century love poem to Krishna and Radha — are woven directly into the silk. The chariots of Rath Yatra are covered and decorated with Khandua silk. Nuapatna alone has approximately 10,000 weavers operating around 6,000 handlooms. These are not art objects. They are liturgical instruments that happen to be beautiful.
Temple Sculpture — The Grammar of Stone
If textiles are the software of Odia material culture — mutable, portable, intimate — then temple sculpture is the hardware. Permanent, monumental, and governed by a grammar as strict as any programming language.
The Kalinga school of temple architecture, which flourished from the seventh to the thirteenth century across what is now Odisha, produced a vocabulary of form so distinctive that a trained eye can identify an Odia temple from a single photograph. The system recognizes three orders of temple structure:
Rekha Deula — the sanctum tower, rising in a curving spire that accelerates as it ascends, like a mathematical function approaching infinity. The profile is not a straight line but a curve that bulges slightly at the base and tapers with increasing velocity toward the crown, culminating in an amalaka (ribbed disc) and a kalasha (sacred pot). The Lingaraja Temple in Bhubaneswar, completed around 1065 CE, is the finest example — 55 meters tall, every inch of its tower sculpted, the very definition of vertical aspiration in stone.
Pidha Deula — the assembly hall, built in a stepped pyramid form. Where the Rekha is a curve, the Pidha is a staircase — horizontal slabs stacked in diminishing tiers. It faces the Rekha tower and serves as the mandapa where devotees gather.
Khakhara Deula — the barrel-vaulted form, recognizable by its rectangular plan and its roof shaped like a truncated, oblong dome. This is the rarest order and is associated almost exclusively with Shakti temples — Chamunda, Durga, the fierce feminine divine. The Vaital Deula in Bhubaneswar, an eighth-century temple built by Queen Tribhuvana Mahadevi of the Bhauma Kara dynasty, is the primary example. Locally called Tini-mundia deula (three-headed temple) for its three spires representing Mahasaraswati, Mahalakshmi, and Mahakali, it houses an eight-armed Chamunda sitting on a corpse, flanked by a jackal and an owl, wearing a garland of skulls. The Khakhara form, with its echoes of the South Indian gopuram, stands as a reminder that Odisha’s architectural traditions did not develop in isolation.
The Rekha and Khakhara house the sanctum; the Pidha is the outer hall. The first two are associated primarily with Shiva, Vishnu, and Surya temples; the third with the goddess. This is not mere convention — it is a spatial theology. The form of the building tells you what kind of divine power resides within.
But the real language of Odia temple art is spoken on the walls. The sculpture programs of the major temples are among the most elaborate in Indian architecture, and they follow a hierarchy that ascends from earth to heaven as the eye moves from base to crown.
At the base: elephant friezes, processions, scenes of daily life. Rising: naga and nagi figures — serpent deities that connect the underworld to the surface, guardians of water and fertility, their sinuous forms wrapping around pilasters. Higher still: the alasa kanyas, the “indolent maidens” — young women caught in poses of languid beauty, wringing water from their hair, reaching for a branch, gazing into a mirror. These are not portraits. They are archetypes — embodiments of shringara rasa, the aesthetic of desire and beauty.
And then, most famously, the mithuna figures. The erotic couples of Konark and other Odia temples have drawn tourists and scandalized colonial administrators for centuries. But the meanings encoded in these carvings are far more precise than any superficial reading suggests.
The erotic sculptures at Konark illustrate the bandhas (positions) described in the Kamasutra, and they are concentrated on the northern face of the temple — the side associated with kama, desire. The southern face carries sculptures signifying karma, dharma, and artha. This is not arbitrary. The temple is a map of the four purusharthas — the four aims of human life in Hindu philosophy: dharma (moral order), artha (material well-being), kama (desire), and moksha (liberation). All four are given architectural space because all four are considered necessary.
Stella Kramrisch, the art historian, offered a crucial insight: the state of sexual union depicted in these sculptures is itself a symbol of moksha — “like a man and woman in close embrace” is an image of the reunion of purusha (essence) and prakriti (nature), the final dissolution of duality that constitutes liberation. The erotic figures are placed on the exterior of the temple. The sanctum — the garbhagriha, the womb-house — is empty of human form, containing only the divine image. The architecture says: desire is the threshold; transcendence lies within. You must pass through the world to arrive at what lies beyond it.
The people who carved these figures belonged to the Sthapathi and Maharana communities. In Puri, a neighborhood called Pathuria Sahi — literally, “the street of stone-workers” — is still crowded with the descendants of the builders of Puri, Bhubaneswar, and Konark. They live in narrow lanes, and in some workshops you can still hear the tap of chisel on stone. But where their ancestors carved for the glory of temples commissioned by kings, these artisans now carve for the tourist market. Miniature replicas of the Konark wheel, small Ganesh figures, decorative panels sold outside the temple gates. The skill has survived. The commission structure has not.
Pipili Applique sits at the intersection of temple craft and commercial evolution. The town of Pipili, between Bhubaneswar and Puri, has been making chandua — ornamental cloth canopies — for the Jagannath Temple since at least the twelfth century. The Darji (tailor) community created decorative fabric panels for the chariots of Rath Yatra. The technique is straightforward in principle: cut pieces of colored fabric are stitched onto a base cloth using straight, satin, blind, or buttonhole stitch to create elaborate patterns and images. The color scheme of the chariot canopies is prescribed by tradition: green and red for Balabhadra’s chariot, black and red for Subhadra’s, yellow and red for Jagannath’s. Above the openings, appliqued mythical motifs — Rahu, Chandra — stand guard.
What happened to Pipili over the past fifty years is a case study in craft commercialization. The demand for Rath Yatra canopies is fixed — three chariots, once a year. But the skill of applique could be applied to garden umbrellas, lampshades, wall hangings, bags, and cushion covers. The town pivoted. Drive through Pipili today on the highway and both sides of the road are lined with shops displaying cascades of brightly colored applique work — parasols, hangings, animal figures, lanterns. It is cheerful, eye-catching, and almost entirely produced for the tourist and export market.
The craft survived by mutating. Whether it is still the same craft — whether a garden umbrella made for a tourist and a sacred chandua made for Jagannath’s chariot carry the same knowledge — is the kind of question that has no clean answer.
Pattachitra — Painting the Divine
In Raghurajpur village, ten kilometers from Puri, every house is a studio. This is not a metaphor. Walk down the single main lane of this village and you will see, on verandahs and in front rooms, artists at work — bending over cloth canvases with brushes so fine that the tip holds perhaps three hairs. The walls of the houses themselves are painted. The gateways are carved. The ground is swept. It looks staged, and it partly is — Raghurajpur was declared India’s heritage crafts village by INTACH in 2000 and was named Best Tourism Village by India’s Ministry of Tourism in 2023. But the painting tradition here predates any designation by at least 1,500 years. The chitrakaras of Raghurajpur have been painting Pattachitra since around the fifth century, making this one of the longest continuously practiced painting traditions on the planet.
Pattachitra means “cloth painting” (patta = cloth, chitra = picture). The canvas is not bought from a shop. It is made. Raw cotton cloth is soaked in water infused with tamarind seed gum, then coated on both sides with a paste of powite (chalk powder) mixed with more tamarind gum. This coating is smoothed and polished with a rough stone until the surface is hard, white, and satin-smooth. The process takes two to three weeks. What emerges is a flexible, rigid surface that accepts paint without bleeding and can last centuries if stored properly.
The colors are — or were — drawn entirely from nature. White from crushed conch shells. Black from the soot of oil lamps (lampblack) or burned coconut shells. Red from hingula (cinnabar) or geru (red ochite). Yellow from haritala (orpiment, arsenic sulfide — beautiful and toxic, like several things in traditional craft). Blue from indigo. Green from crushed neem or other leaves. Orange from a mix of geru and haritala. These pigments are ground by hand, mixed with water and kaitha (wood apple) gum as a binding medium, and applied with brushes made from the hair of domestic animals, the finest from mouse whiskers.
The palette is deliberately limited. Five core colors — red, yellow, black, white, and blue-green — and their combinations. This constraint is not poverty of means but an aesthetic discipline. The Pattachitra tradition works within the same logic as a well-designed type system in software: a finite set of primitives that, through combination and composition, can express an infinite range of subjects.
And the subjects are overwhelmingly divine. The most common themes include the Dashavatara (ten incarnations of Vishnu), Krishna Lila (the playful and profound episodes of Krishna’s life — Kaliya Dalan, Rasa Lila, Vastra Haran), the Navagraha (nine planets), and — most distinctively — the Thia Badhia, a painting of the Jagannath Temple itself as subject. The Thia Badhia is not a realistic architectural rendering. It is a cosmological diagram: the temple shown in simultaneous cross-section, elevation, and plan, the deities visible within the garbhagriha, the surrounding structure a mandala of sacred space.
There is a specifically Odia quality to these paintings that distinguishes them from the Pattachitra traditions of Bengal. The figures have bold, dark outlines. The compositions are dense, every square centimeter filled — there is no negative space, because in the Odia Pattachitra universe, there is no void. Borders are elaborate, featuring floral scrollwork that frames the central narrative like the carved borders of a temple doorway. The eyes of the figures are large, almond-shaped, and often the last element painted — the eyes are opened last, a ritual moment that mirrors the consecration of a temple image.
The chitrakaras are — or were — a hereditary caste community. The name means “picture-maker,” and the social role was precise: they served the Jagannath Temple, painting the Anasara Patti (the temporary cloth paintings of the deities displayed during the annual festival when the wooden images are being repainted), and they produced religious paintings and playing cards (Ganjapa) for both ritual and secular use.
A master artist in Raghurajpur can take twenty-five to forty days to finish an elaborate Dashavatara or Krishna Lila Pattachitra. The level of detail is astonishing — individual eyelashes, patterns on garments, scales on serpents, all executed with a brush whose effective width is less than a millimeter.
What has changed is the market. Pattachitra was once a ritual object — commissioned by temples, purchased by pilgrims as religious souvenirs, given as devotional offerings. Today, it is an art commodity sold in galleries, e-commerce platforms, and government emporiums. The shift has brought income (some successful artists earn reasonably well from international sales and exhibitions) and access (women from non-chitrakara families have entered the practice). It has also introduced distortion. Acrylic paints have replaced natural pigments in many workshops — they are cheaper, more vivid, easier to source, and they lack the subtle, earthy warmth of conch-shell white and lampblack. Small Pattachitras mass-produced for the tourist market are sometimes painted by apprentices who have learned the forms but not the patience. The ritual context that gave the paintings their meaning — the temple commission, the festival calendar, the devotional economy — is thinning.
The art survives. Whether the ecology that produced it survives is a different question.
Palm-Leaf Manuscripts and Illustrations
Before paper, before printing, before the screen you are reading this on, there was the leaf. Specifically, the leaf of the palmyra palm (Borassus flabellifer) and the talipot palm (Corypha umbraculifera), dried, trimmed, and prepared to receive the stylus.
Odisha possesses the largest collection of palm-leaf manuscripts in the world. The Odisha State Museum in Bhubaneswar alone houses over 40,000. The oldest manuscript in the collection dates to the fourteenth century, though the texts themselves — scriptures, philosophical treatises, astronomical calculations — originate centuries earlier. These are written predominantly in the Odia script, though the language is often Sanskrit. The collection spans 27 categories: Vedas, Tantra, religious scriptures, philosophy, astrology, Ayurveda, grammar, lexicons, music, Puranas, Kavyas, mathematics. An entire civilization’s knowledge system, recorded on leaves.
The technique is called Tala Patra Chitra — palm-leaf painting — and the process is irreducible. Fresh palm leaves are harvested and dried in the sun for two to three months. The dried leaves are then soaked in water and treated with a solution of turmeric paste, which acts as both a preservative and an insect deterrent. The treated leaves are cut into uniform strips, smoothed, and stacked. Holes are punched through the stack, and a cord is threaded through to hold the leaves together — this is the basic form of the pothi, the palm-leaf book.
Writing and illustration are done with a lekhani — an iron stylus with a sharp point. The artist does not draw on the leaf; they incise it. The stylus cuts shallow grooves into the surface, and then lampblack (or a paste of charcoal and oil) is rubbed across the leaf. The pigment settles into the grooves. The surface is wiped clean, and the incised lines appear as dark marks against the pale leaf. The result is a medium of extraordinary precision and permanence — a well-preserved palm-leaf manuscript can survive for centuries.
The illustrated manuscripts of Odisha are among the great under-recognized achievements of Indian art. The Gita Govinda — Jayadeva’s twelfth-century Sanskrit poem describing the love of Radha and Krishna, composed in what is now Odisha — was one of the most frequently illustrated texts. Palm-leaf versions of the Gita Govinda feature scenes of erotic intimacy that are simultaneously devotional and sensuous, rendered with a miniaturist’s precision in a space no wider than a hand’s breadth. The Ramayana, the Bhagavata Purana, and the Kamasutra were also illustrated — the erotic palm-leaf manuscripts of Odisha constitute a significant but under-discussed tradition, perhaps because they complicate the Victorian and post-Victorian tendency to separate the sacred from the sexual. In the Odia palm-leaf tradition, as in the temple sculpture tradition, that separation does not exist.
The conservation crisis is real and ongoing. Of the 40,000-plus manuscripts in the Odisha State Museum, roughly 7,000 have been conserved — cleaned, repaired where worms have bored through the leaves, relinked where the writing has faded to invisibility. That leaves over 33,000 manuscripts in varying states of decay. Traditional preservation methods — rubbing turmeric paste, placing powdered neem leaves between pages, periodic drying in gentle sunlight — are being supplemented with modern techniques, and a digitization effort is underway. But the scale of the task is immense, the funding uncertain, and the expertise rare.
These manuscripts are not antiquarian curiosities. They are the hard drives of a pre-digital civilization. Every one that crumbles to dust is a data loss that cannot be recovered.
Silver Filigree — Tarakasi
The word tarakasi is Odia, from tara (wire) and kasi (design). The English term is silver filigree. The technique is this: pure silver (90% or higher) is drawn through progressively smaller holes in a draw plate until it becomes wire so fine that a single strand is barely visible to the naked eye. These wires are then bent, twisted, coiled, and soldered by hand into intricate patterns — floral scrolls, peacocks, deities, abstract geometries — that have the visual density of lace and the permanence of metal.
Cuttack, Odisha’s judicial capital and former seat of Mughal and Maratha power, has been the center of tarakasi for over five hundred years. The artisans — silversmiths who constitute a distinct occupational community — work in small workshops, often in the older quarters of the city. The tools are simple: a small blowtorch for soldering, tweezers, pliers, the draw plate, a flat work surface. The skill is not in the tools. It is in the hands, and specifically in the astonishing patience required to bend a silver wire thinner than a human hair into a precise curl, solder it to an adjacent curl, and repeat this action thousands of times until a complete design emerges.
Tarakasi produces jewelry — necklaces, earrings, bangles, nose rings — as well as decorative objects: miniature temples, elephants, sailing ships, fruit bowls, frames. But the most spectacular expression of the craft occurs once a year, during Cuttack’s Durga Puja.
Cuttack’s Durga Puja is not the same as Kolkata’s. The tradition of worshipping clay images of Durga here dates to at least 1510 CE, making it arguably older than Bengal’s famous celebration. But the distinguishing feature is the chandi medha — the elaborate silver filigree decoration that forms the backdrop and adornment for the Durga idol. A chandi medha is not a small object. It is an architectural installation, sometimes several meters tall, made entirely of silver filigree work: cascading panels of silver lacework, filigree arches, silver-wire flowers, entire tableaus constructed from the same material that elsewhere becomes a pair of earrings. The cost of constructing a single chandi medha ranges from seventy-five lakh to one crore rupees. The city’s puja mandaps compete in scale and splendor. Filigree and gold embellishments worth over sixty crore rupees are deployed across Cuttack’s roughly 170 puja mandaps during the festival season.
Cuttack’s tarakasi received its GI tag in 2024 — the recognition of a tradition over five centuries old. But the economics of the craft are dire. In 1995-96, Cuttack had 3,079 filigree artisans. By 2019-20, the number had fallen to 612. The decline is a compound of multiple pressures. Artisans earn between 8,000 and 15,000 rupees per month for most of the year — the Durga Puja season is the only period of reliable income. The work carries severe occupational health risks: over 95% of artisans report chronic pain in the back, neck, shoulders, hands, and fingers from years of sitting in bent positions doing microscopic work. Fake tarakasi products manufactured in Kolkata and elsewhere undercut the market. Young people, unsurprisingly, are not lining up to enter a profession that pays poorly, damages the body, and faces competition from machine-made imitations.
The GI tag promises market protection — in theory. In practice, enforcement is negligible. A GI tag tells you what a product is. It does not tell anyone to buy it.
Dhokra and Bell Metal
Four thousand years ago, someone in the Indus Valley made a small bronze figure of a dancing girl — weight shifted to one hip, arm bangles stacked to the shoulder, chin tilted upward with a confidence that transcends millennia. She was cast using the lost-wax technique. That same technique, virtually unchanged, is practiced today in the villages of Sadeibereni and Nuagaon in Dhenkanal district and in settlements across Mayurbhanj, by tribal artisans of the Sithulia, Ghontana, and Ghasi communities.
The Dhokra (also spelled Dokra) process is slow and unforgiving. It begins with a core: a rough shape of the intended object — say, an elephant, or a tribal deity, or an oil lamp — molded from a mixture of clay, rice husk, and water. This core is dried in the sun. Then comes the wax. Beeswax, mixed with resin from the damara tree and nut oil, is melted, strained, and rolled into thin threads. These wax threads are wound around the clay core, shaped and carved with fine detail — the elephant’s trunk, the deity’s eyes, the texture of a necklace. The wax model, complete in every detail, is then coated in several layers of clay, creating a thick outer mold. Drain ducts are left — channels through which the wax will escape.
The mold is fired at temperatures approaching 1,100 degrees Celsius. The wax melts and flows out through the drain holes, leaving a thin, detailed cavity between the inner core and the outer mold — a negative impression of the finished object. Molten brass or bell metal (an alloy of copper and tin) is poured into this cavity through a hole at the top. The hot metal fills every space the wax once occupied. When the metal cools and solidifies, the outer clay is chipped away, the inner core is broken out, and the metal figure emerges.
The technique is called “lost wax” because the wax model is destroyed in the process. Every casting is unique. There are no two identical Dhokra pieces, because the wax model that produced each one no longer exists.
In Dhenkanal district, around 160 artisans practice Dhokra casting across two villages. Sadeibereni, recognized as an “Artisan Village,” is home to over 90 artisans; Nuagaon has over 70. In Mayurbhanj, the tradition is particularly known for horse and elephant figurines — lifelike yet rough-textured, with a raw, tactile quality that is the antithesis of factory-smooth finish. The surface texture of Dhokra work — slightly granular, marked with the imprint of the wax threads — is not a flaw. It is the fingerprint of the process, the evidence that a human hand shaped the wax before fire transformed it into metal.
Bell metal (kansa) is a related but distinct tradition. Kansa is an alloy of copper and tin — roughly 78% copper to 22% tin — that produces a metal with a warm golden color and, according to Ayurvedic tradition, the ability to purify food. The traditional Odia dining plate (thali) and the smaller bowl (bela or katori) were made of kansa, and in many households, eating from kansa was a daily practice, not a luxury.
The production centers include Kantilo (on the banks of the Mahanadi), Balakati (in Khordha district), Bhuban, and Bellaguntha. The craft’s historical roots run deep — Gajapati kings of the Suryavanshi dynasty, who ruled from the fifteenth century, are said to have invited Kansari artisans from Kannauj (in present-day Uttar Pradesh) to Kantilo to establish the craft. The technique used at Balakati is primarily the pita method: pre-heated metal ingots of copper and tin alloy are hammered into shape on anvils. The shaping is done before sunrise — the metal must be worked at a specific temperature, and the cool pre-dawn hours give the artisans the thermal window they need.
The kansa thali is more than a plate. It is a material argument about the relationship between food and health — that the vessel shapes the meal, that what you eat from matters as much as what you eat. In an age of stainless steel and melamine, this argument sounds quaint. In an age of microplastics, it sounds prophetic.
The Economics of Craft Survival
Every tradition described above — the bandha of the Meher weavers, the Pattachitra of the chitrakaras, the tarakasi of Cuttack’s silversmiths, the Dhokra of Dhenkanal’s tribal casters — shares a common structural problem. The skills required are immense. The time demanded is extreme. And the economic return, for most practitioners, does not constitute a living wage.
Begin with the weavers. The Fourth All India Handloom Census (2019-20) counted 53,472 handloom weavers in Odisha. Some estimates, including allied workers and part-time weavers, push the number to over 130,000 across 27 weaving clusters. Bargarh district alone supports roughly 35,000 primary and allied weaver households — about 30% of the state’s total.
A weaver in Bargarh earns between 250 and 350 rupees per day. That is 7,500 to 10,500 rupees per month. A Sambalpuri silk saree that takes two to three weeks of combined tying and weaving effort might sell at the loom for 2,000 to 5,000 rupees. That same saree, in a retail showroom in Delhi or Mumbai, might carry a price tag of 8,000 to 25,000 rupees or more. The rural craft producer consistently captures only 20 to 25% of the final retail price. The remaining 75 to 80% is absorbed by middlemen, wholesalers, retailers, and logistics. This is not unique to Odisha — it is the universal structure of artisanal economies — but it is unusually painful here because the skills involved are so demanding and the alternatives so limited.
Then there is the powerloom. A handwoven Sambalpuri saree takes days. A powerloom copy, produced mechanically using digital printing or jacquard technology, takes hours. The copies reproduce the visual appearance of bandha patterns without any of the tying-and-dyeing process. A printed duplicate Sambalpuri saree sells for as little as 200 rupees. An original costs 2,000 or more. For a buyer who cannot (or does not care to) distinguish the authentic from the imitation, the choice is obvious. For the weaver, it is an existential crisis.
The consequences are visible. Young weavers are migrating to cities — Surat, Bangalore, Hyderabad — to work in construction, textile factories, and service industries. The tragedy is layered: the children of ikat masters become workers in powerloom factories, their inherited knowledge of bandha kala rendered economically worthless by the very technology that copies its appearance. In Kalahandi, the Habaspuri tradition has gone from 4,000 weavers to 250. In Cuttack, tarakasi artisans have fallen from 3,079 to 612 in twenty-five years.
The government’s primary intervention tool is the cooperative. Boyanika — the Odisha State Handloom Weavers’ Cooperative Society — was established in 1956 and operates as a bridge between weavers and markets. It provides raw materials, design support, and marketing infrastructure through a network of 513 primary weavers’ cooperative societies, empowering over 35,000 weavers. With 40 retail stores across Odisha, New Delhi, and Kolkata, and an annual turnover of 223 crore rupees (in 2024-25), Boyanika is a significant institutional presence.
Utkalika — the Odisha State Cooperative Handicraft Corporation — performs a similar function for the handicrafts sector, operating 17 branches and providing raw materials, skill training, product development programs, and marketing support.
These institutions matter. Without them, many weavers would have no market access at all. But cooperatives, by their nature, are bureaucratic structures operating in a market economy. The gap between what a cooperative can offer (a guaranteed buyer at a fixed rate) and what the market can offer (direct-to-consumer sales at premium prices, international exposure, brand recognition) defines the space where craft either transforms or dies.
The GI tag is the other major institutional tool. Odisha has secured GI registrations for Sambalpuri, Kotpad, Bomkai, Habaspuri, Khandua, Dhalapathar, and Cuttack Rupa Tarakasi, among others. A GI tag establishes legal protection for the geographic origin and traditional method of a product. It says: this is the real thing, and anything else is not.
But a GI tag is a legal instrument, not a market instrument. It can prevent (in theory) the sale of fake Sambalpuri sarees. It cannot make a buyer choose the real one over the fake. It does not increase the weaver’s income, improve the supply chain, or solve the problem of young people leaving the craft. The GI tag is a certificate of authenticity in a market that does not always value authenticity. It is necessary but insufficient — the floor, not the ceiling.
Tourism is the other force acting on craft traditions, and it cuts both ways. Raghurajpur’s designation as a heritage village has brought visitors, income, and visibility. The Pattachitra tradition is arguably more economically viable today than it has been in decades, precisely because tourism and the global art market have created new demand. But tourism demand distorts. It favors small, portable, quickly produced items over large, elaborate, time-consuming ones. It incentivizes bright, visually striking work over subtlety. It pushes acrylic paints over natural pigments because acrylics are brighter and cheaper. The tourist buys what they can carry on an airplane. The pilgrim once bought what the gods required.
The fundamental question — the one that governs the future of every tradition discussed in this chapter — is this: can craft traditions survive when they cannot pay a living wage?
The honest answer is: not in their current form. A system where a master weaver earns less than a food delivery rider in a tier-two city, where a silver filigree artisan develops chronic pain for 8,000 rupees a month, where a young person’s rational economic choice is to abandon inherited skill for unskilled urban labor — this system is not sustainable. It does not matter how many GI tags are issued, how many heritage villages are designated, how many craft exhibitions are organized. If the economics do not work, the knowledge dies when the last practitioner who can afford to practice it stops.
What would it take? Direct-to-consumer digital platforms that cut out middlemen (some, like Utkalamrita, are trying). Premium branding that communicates the labor and skill embedded in each piece (a Sambalpuri double ikat saree is among the most technically demanding textiles on earth — it should be priced accordingly). Strict enforcement of anti-counterfeiting measures so that powerlooms cannot freely appropriate handloom designs. Educational programs that make craft a viable career, not a hereditary obligation. And, perhaps most importantly, a cultural shift in which buying handloom is understood not as a charity or a nostalgic gesture but as a recognition of extraordinary human achievement.
Sushila Meher in Kardola ties her knots. A chitrakara in Raghurajpur mixes conch-shell white with kaitha gum. A silversmith in Cuttack bends a wire thinner than a hair into a perfect curl. A Dhokra caster in Sadeibereni pours molten brass into a clay mold and waits for the wax to vanish. Each of them is performing an act that links the present to a past measured not in decades but in centuries. The thread, the stone, the leaf, the metal — these materials do not change. What changes is whether the hands that shape them can afford to keep shaping.
The answer to that question will not be determined by tradition. It will be determined by economics. And economics, unlike craft, has no memory.
Source Research
The raw research that informs this series.