Upon graduation in 2002 I was awarded the Bruce Church Travel Scholarship. A major element of my research was spent in India where I worked directly with tribal Rajasthani Blacksmiths, the Gaduliya Lohar. The Lohar live a subsistence lifestyle and make tools, household and agricultural implements in the intense often 40+ degree heat of the desert. The Gaduliya Lohar people (Gaduliya also spelled Gadia meaning Cart and Lohar meaning Iron) can be found all over North and Western India, working their roadside forges and travelling and living in their distinctive decorated bullock carts.

Forging In the Heat of the Desert

I was taken under the wing of Master Blacksmith Samila Ram and his lovely wife Deepak Devi, and viewed as a curiosity by the entire settlement of Lohar folk!  They knew as much English as I did Marwari, their local dialect, but we muddled through with a combination of hand signals and an English to Hindi Dictionary. Working from a squatting position I had to relearn everything I had previously learned about Blacksmithing in a tiny village in the Great Thar Desert in Western Rajasthan.

The Legend of The Swordsmiths of Mewar

Descended from the Swordsmiths of Mewar, the Gaduliya Lohar have maintained a nomadic existence for over 400 years. They honour a vow made by their Rajput Warrior ancestors to the Maharana Pratap who valued their skills so highly that he spared their lives by allowing them to flee rather than stay to fight and face certain death in a doomed battle when their Fort at Chittaurgarh was seized by Akbar in 1568. Their legendary vow - for them never to settle, never to draw water from a well, never to use a light at night and never to return to the Fort at Chittaurgarh, has, in some parts, been honoured to this day. At the time of Indian Independence, then Prime Minister Nehru attempted to settle the Lohar People. Many have chosen to keep their vow and thus their lifestyle but there are increasing numbers of Lohar who have now adapted to a settled lifestyle due to economic and societal pressures.

It was quite challenging at first to work from this position and to adjust to occasionally using my bare feet to steady the metal when required, no Health and Safety in the workplace regulations here! They taught me how to build a hand turned bicycle wheel powered bellows and a forge in the earth.  We worked on a selection of tools and handicraft, all using the most rudimentary of equipment, the anvil consisting of a piece of old railway iron.

I was enlightened by the methods shown to me. It was not that their methods were so different from what I had previously learned (apart from working in the squatting position), Blacksmithing as a craft has not changed much for hundreds of years and the techniques used in forging metal are similar the world over. It was their amazing ability to fashion something out of almost nothing and by necessity they conserve their materials by using very sparing amounts of coke for the tiniest of fires in the forge. They are the most efficient of Blacksmiths! Their fires often started with goat dung, their natural locally collected fire lighters. It was in stark contrast to the shameful excess and large fires I had been used to using in the UK.

I had an amazing and very challenging experience during which I documented the techniques and methods of making that I encountered in drawings, writing and photographs. I felt privileged to have been welcomed into their lives and I was genuinely struck by the warmth and hospitality of my host family, but also worried for their tradition of the handmade craft, as India rolls onwards towards a developed first world lifestyle, bringing with it cheap goods wrought from mechanization and mass production. For the first time in generations, Samila Ram’s Sons, although highly skilled in the Art of Blacksmithing, have all chosen to work in other professions, seeking a more economically prosperous and stable future rather than carrying on the traditions of the Gaduliya Lohar.

Photos - Sam Clements

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