The Gadia Lohars: The Wandering Ironsmiths at the Fag End of Their Trade

 **2003**

The mid-May heat is merciless. The noons are blazing like a furnace. Temperature over forty degrees centigrade. Even the perspiration seems to vaporize on your face under such a merciless shower of sunrays.

The gypsy women, attired in cheap, bright-coloured, mirror-worked bodices and frilled long skirts of purple colour, with heaps of cheap iron vessels on their heads, are doing rounds in the village streets.

These are iron basins of various shapes and sizes for different purposes, basically agricultural and livestock activities.

But these are the days of manufacturing. You have big factories these days which churn out such utensils on mass-production lines, and the individual items are very cost-effective to the customers.

So these ironsmith nomads, the Gadia Lohars, have lost their footing in the competition.

Earlier, they used to forge small agricultural implements and such utensils, working on their hand-operated furnaces, and then they would go around in the North Indian countryside, pitching up tents by the settlements, selling their wares and then moving on.

But that is no longer economically feasible.

They now purchase them from the cheap manufacturing units. So modern technology finds them just vendors of the finished product. Through bartering, mostly with wheat, they hope to earn a tiny margin.

Still, they manufacture some kitchen trivialities, like those made with sheets cut from butter cans and oil cans. So somehow, their tiny forgeries find them hammering on the anvil, and the trade and its wandering keepers still survive at its fag end.

These women thus have, in addition to the purchased basins, tiny scrubbers, a little boat of sheet metal for milk pots and sour-milk pots, spoons of different contrivances, spoon holders, coarse mesh to clean grains, winnowing pans, etc.

And laden with these things, these women wander through the hotly shining streets of the village.

It is almost two o'clock in the afternoon.

So they almost plead, request, beseech, almost beg the ladyfolk to purchase some item.

"Behenji, please take something. I will give you at a very low price. Haven't opened the account since morning," they would plead.

But the ordeal continues.

So, fruitlessly, shedding lots of sweat, they go from street to street, walking and calling out in their typically significant loud voices, amply supported by their dialect.