Imagine the expression of the woman who saw her reflection of her face in a quiet pool of water for the first time after the evolution of the genus called Homo sapiens!

Mirrors have always fascinated man kind that is why the famous fable Snow White and the seven Dwarfs reads ‘Mirror mirror, on the wall, which is the fairest of them all?’

The happiness that Sharda Srinivasan a researcher in Archaeometallurgy in the National Institute of Advanced Studies at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore must have had after her discovering the secret of Aranmula mirrors must have been no less than all those fabled characters!

Aranmula a small hamlet in south Kerala has a unique tradition of making high cast tin-bronze mirror of 33 percent tin with reflective properties comparable, if not better, than the modern mercury-coated mirrors.
It indeed interesting to know that mirrors too have a history, perhaps some of them may be older than history.
In China and India, mirrors had had a magico-religious history, says Sharda. Excavations at Harappa in Pakistan and Dholavira in Gujarat yielded flat, circular tanged mirrors, dated as old as ca. 2000BC. These mirrors have a low tin content of less than 10 percent.

Centuries ago bronze mirrors with higher tin content were in vogue in different parts of the ancient civilizations. High amount of tin in bronze adds to the reflectivity. Thus says Sharda that alpha phase and delta component of bronze produces a silvery white metal. In order to make this metal malleable the ancestors cast bronze with 20-25 percent tin and 5-10 percent lead, particularly from Han, China and the Roman world from the Christian era. Bronze mirrors are most prolific and artistic art objects from China.

Ancestral craftsmen at Aranmula realized pretty early that the presence of lead ‘dulls’ the mirror. Studies by Sharda and her colleague discovered the secret that Aranmula mirrors were made of high-tin ‘delta’ bronze’ i.e. a binary copper-tin alloy with 32-34 percent tin.

The skill was developed to such perfection that the alloy made for mirrors matched the pure delta phase of bronze, an intermediate compound (Cu31Sn8) of fixed composition 32.6 percent tin. This type of alloy offers the best possible uniformly polished surface and is long lasting.

Aranmula mirrors apart from a reflection on the technical skills are sacred for many communities of south. For the ‘Nair’ and the ‘Namboodiri’ communities these form part of the wedding trousseau. The makers of these mirrors called as the ‘Acharis’ guard their trade secret zealously. 

The find of Sharda is significant because it lends credence to fact that copper-bronze traditions were indigenous to our continent. Not only high quality mirrors, but excavations at various places in south India have brought to light solid cast bronze images, ß bronze coinage, a bronze slags.

The high-tin ß bronzes and vessels from Indian prehistory predate those known elsewhere and go back to Indus Valley civilization era.

With such an advanced state of metallurgy in the eras gone by it is fascinating to visualize that the material smelted there must have been mined locally. Was the industry so productive that the entire material has been exhausted or is still much of it lying obscured from the sight of the geologists/explorers? Time will tell?