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Moradabad Brass: The Metalwork of Peetal Nagri

In Moradabad, sand from the Ramganga, fire, and a hand-held chisel turn plain brass into engraved work the world has bought for four centuries.

Walk through the old quarters of Moradabad on a weekday morning and the city announces itself through sound before sight: the rhythmic clinking of chisels on metal, the low roar of furnaces, and men carrying stacks of polished trays through lanes barely wide enough for two. This is Peetal Nagri, the Brass City, a town in western Uttar Pradesh about 167 kilometres from Delhi, where brass has been cast, hammered, and engraved for some four hundred years.

History and origins

Moradabad was founded in 1625 by Rustam Khan, governor of Katehar under the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, and named after the emperor's youngest son, Prince Murad Bakhsh. The metal craft itself is traced to the seventeenth century, under Mughal patronage, when Kashmiri artisans settled in the town, according to the Development Commissioner for Handicrafts.

The craft grew steadily through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and by the late nineteenth century Moradabadi lacquerware was drawing attention at international exhibitions, including the Wembley Exhibition in London in 1924–25. A decisive figure in the modern trade was Haji Kallan, a local craftsman who began exporting brassware and turned the small city into an international trading hub.

Materials: brass, sand, and fire

The central material is brass, an alloy of copper and zinc, with lead traditionally included in the Moradabad mix. Scrap copper, zinc, and lead are melted together with flux in a coal-fired furnace, a process the casters call galana. The other essential material is not a metal at all: it is the fine, soft sand of the Ramganga River, mixed with a binder to form the moulds. Its fineness is credited with the sharpness of Moradabad casting, and it is named in the craft's Geographical Indication documents as one of the things that makes the work distinctive.

The tools are simple and have changed little: the bhatti, or furnace; the gharia, or crucible; sansi, tongs; karchul, a pouring spoon; thapi, a mallet; and kalam and lahni, fine chisels of different points.

Technique: seven steps from sand to shine

Making a brass piece in Moradabad traditionally follows seven steps: mould making, melting, casting, scraping, engraving, colouring, and polishing.

First comes mould making, or darza banana: the master pattern is packed in bonded sand to form the mould. Then the alloy is melted in the furnace and poured into the mould. Once it has cooled, the sand mould is broken away and the rough casting is cleaned: gates and rough edges are removed with hammers and files, and the surface is smoothed on a lathe and with sandpaper.

Then comes engraving, the heart of the craft, done entirely by hand with fine chisels struck by a mallet, the craftsman working from memory unless a new design has been commissioned. Shallow engraving is called naqqashi or sadakalam; deep engraving is khudai or siakalam. In khudai the designs are intricate and the chased depressions are filled with coloured lac, heated and applied so that the design gleams in golden tracery against translucent, jewel-coloured lac. A related technique, marori, builds elaborate designs by pounding the base metal and filling the gaps with resin, so the pattern seems to bloom from the surface. Finally the piece is polished, lacquered, or enamelled, and inspected before it leaves the workshop.

Motifs and design language

Moradabad's design language carries the traces of Islamic culture alongside Indian forms, a reflection of the city's Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, the shared Hindu-Muslim culture of the region. Traditional styles are mostly floral arabesques: scrolling vines, leaves, and blossoms that flow across a vessel without a clear beginning or end, often combined with geometric borders and calligraphic bands.

The range is enormous, from miniature vintage cars to standing lamps and temple bells, and the same engraving hand can move between them. What holds the work together is not a single motif but a quality: the engraving is fine, dense, and even, the lines confident and unhesitating, and the lacquer fill, where used, sits flush and clear. A Moradabad piece is meant to be looked at closely, and its pleasure is in that closeness.

GI-tag status

Moradabad Metal Craft is a registered Geographical Indication in India. The application, filed on 9 February 2009 by the Export Promotion Bureau of the Government of Uttar Pradesh, covered the whole district of Moradabad, and the GI certificate was granted on 31 March 2014. The tag covers a wide range of products, including utensils, figurines, lamps, and candlesticks, in brass and in the other metals the city now works.

How to identify an authentic piece

Start with the engraving. On a genuine hand-engraved Moradabad piece, the lines are cut by a chisel, so they vary slightly in depth and width, and the design is not perfectly identical from one piece to the next. Machine-stamped or cast-in patterns are uniform, shallow, and repeated without variation, and a moulded copy of an engraved design will have soft, rounded lines rather than the crisp cut of a chisel. Check the weight and the finish on the underside, which on a hand-finished piece is filed and smoothed rather than left rough, and ask the seller where the piece was made and whether it carries GI documentation from an authorised producer group.

Where the craft stands today

Moradabad today is both a craft town and an export industry, and the two descriptions pull in different directions. The GI application recorded about 5,250 small-scale metalware units in the district, and more recent reports put the wider ecosystem at around 30,000 to 40,000 manufacturers and close to 2.5 lakh workers, with roughly 600 export units and annual exports reported at about Rs 4,500 crore. The city accounts for a large share of India's handicraft exports, supplying global brands in the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, and Japan. The work runs through a three-tier structure: karigars who cast, engrave, and polish; manufacturers who aggregate their output; and exporters who connect it to global buyers.

That scale has not lifted the artisans who do the hardest work. In 2018 the National Green Tribunal's intervention led to the closure of at least 75 brass-making units for pollution violations, leaving hundreds of daily-wage workers without immediate recourse. At the same time, the craft is finding new champions: Baburam Yadav, a marori artisan of six decades, received the Padma Shri in 2024. The future of Moradabad brass will depend on whether that recognition reaches the workshops themselves, where the chisel still meets the metal one strike at a time.