Tradition · lost-wax metal casting
Ḍhokrā
Also known as Dokra, Dhokra Damar, Bastar bell metal, Ḍhokrā — lost-wax casting of the eastern belt
Hollow brass figures cast by the lost-wax method in a continuous band of Adivasi and artisan settlements from Bastar through western Odisha to Bankura, built up from rolled wax threads that leave the finished metal visibly ridged.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 19.800, 84.000
Worth knowing
The technique is the same one used for the dancing girl of Mohenjo-daro more than four thousand years earlier, which makes it one of the longest unbroken manufacturing traditions anywhere. The name comes from the Dhokra Damar, an itinerant caste of the Bengal–Odisha border who carried furnace and moulds from village to village.
Connections (3)
- Craft tradition ofMohenjo-daro
The lost-wax method still used from Bastar to Bankura is the one that produced the dancing girl of Mohenjo-daro in the third millennium BCE: a wax model over a clay core, invested in clay, melted out and replaced by molten metal. Nothing in the intervening four thousand years connects the two in any documented line, but the process is identical at every step, which makes it among the longest continuously practised manufacturing techniques anywhere in the world.
- Craft tradition ofBastar
Bastar's Ghadwa smiths cast by the coiled-wax method that gives Dhokra its wound surface, and the same plateau carries wrought-iron work, wood carving and terracotta horses, several of them practised by particular communities for the raja's household. The concentration is not accidental: a court that survived until 1948 kept its craft groups attached to it.
- Craft tradition ofBarsur
Bastar's Ghadwa smiths cast by the coiled-wax method, and the plateau also carries wrought iron, wood carving and terracotta horses. Barsur's eleventh-century stone sculpture and the living metal work are separated by nine hundred years and by nothing else: the same plateau, and in several cases the same communities attached to the same court.
On these journeys
- Craft and industry — where things are made and why there
- Forests, Adivasi worlds & craft
- Chhattisgarh & Bastar
Sources
Wikipedia, “Dhokra”. Geographical Indications Registry (Government of India) filings; Ministry of Textiles and Sangeet Natak Akademi craft documentation.
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