Abstract:

Dhokra is a brass metal craft manufactured from scrap brass metal by a few communities of central and eastern India, coming mainly from the Dariapur and Bankura regions of West Bengal and the Bastar region of Madhya Pradesh. However, I have referred here to the dhokra work of Jadupatias- an almost extinct community by profession in the Dumka region of Jharkhand, the community that I have studied during my PhD. The Jadupatias make their craft through the cire-perdue or lost wax technique, one of the oldest technologies of metallurgy.

In the present seminar, there will be an attempt to present a few glimpses of the process of making of dhokra through the ontological categories of Heidegger and Whitehead and will highlight the methodology/philosophy of their ontologies. This may seem to be very out of place and oxymoronic in the context of understanding the crafts and craft communities of India. On the one hand, there have been rich literary texts on the many craft communities that have recorded the symbolical aspects of their crafts and community dynamics based on those meanings, and so there has been a prominence of the approach of "signification" in the analyses of crafts that try to make sense of the craft communities' ideologies and identities. On the other hand, the ontologies that have been used by me is coming from the deliberations of Western scholarship that have not so much focused on the "images/symbolical meanings" as much as the "processes", yet my work does not ignore the sense of "meaning" altogether. Thus, it is a significant departure from the earlier works as in the case of Jadupatias there is a clear absence of any community ideology or any literary reference, and yet the work deliberates on the problems of craftsmen through the ontologies that invoke the images of craftsman's struggles in making the materials to yield against the passing time and range of emotions and situations that craftsmen may have to negotiate.