| Often when tourists coming to Santiniketan ask me what there is "to do," I recommend a trip to Guskara, 30 km from Santiniketan. Like Bihar and Orissa, Bengal too has its traditional bronze casting, popularly known as dokra and it is done in a small village near Guskara. For almost all the thirty-odd households in this village, dokra is livelihood. So a walk around is a complete lesson in this age-old bronze casting method. It is fascinating to see how an item is first moulded in wax, then covered in layers of mud with a funnel shape on top through which the molten bronze is poured. |
| Fascinating as I find the casting process, my reason for recommending a trip to this village to friends and acquaintances from the city is also to expose them to the reality of poverty in rural Bengal. Since the dokra workers have no land and depend only on their craft for their livelihood, their state of finances is apparent on a visit to the village. On occasions I have found the whole village smiling and organising tea and sweets for us while on other occasions there has been an air of quiet desperation. The torn sarees of the women and the bare bodies of the children form a grim background to the magic fingers of the dokra workers. Quite often they have nothing to sell to the visitors because bronze is expensive and they cannot afford inventory. A small room constructed in cement (the only one in the village) was intended as a sales outlet to be run as a cooperative. I have never seen the door unlocked. |
| In early July my brother-in-law and niece who live in Paris came to spend a month with us in Santiniketan. Since my brother-in-law is a Moroccan and a calligraphy artist, I was very keen to experiment fusing some of his designs with traditional crafts of the kantha embroiderers, the ironsmith or the dokra craftsmen. While the kantha and ironwork were relatively easy to tackle, I knew that the dokra would not be. So before setting a date to visit the dokra village we had many a discussion on how to try out designs for cutlery, buttons or glass holders: items that are not traditionally made. While my brother-in-law painstakingly drew the designs, I was working on the rough casting. So we set off for Guskara one morning and as we approached the village, my city-bred niece was visibly taken in by the abject poverty that she witnessed. My brother-in-law was excited about the prospect of working in a new medium and was focused on that. |
| Harubabu, a national award-winning craftsman who has in his time visited many a country on government-sponsored craft fairs, lives at the edge of the village with his family. He and his son had spent a week with us in Santiniketan when we had had a casting workshop in our garden. Since then Harubabu considered me close enough to call and ask for help whenever in financial difficulty. His house was our first port of call. We then went around the village, me explaining to my niece the process in English, she translating that into French for her father and stopping occasionally to comment on the talent that manages to flourish even under extreme degradation. After a walk through the village we came back to say good-bye to Harubabu before leaving. |
| Harubabu's wife and son gathered a few broken moras for us to sit on. We had to drink our mandatory tea with half the village looking on. Harubabu seemed embarrassed and told the onlookers to get going. I tried to tell him that my brother-in-law too was an artist and would love an opportunity to jointly work on a piece. He gave us a big smile and listed once more the countries he had been to. And just in case his surroundings made us discount his claims, he said to me, "Please tell him I know that in his country now it is night." |
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