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