A silver cluster in Belagavi

Artisans in Manguru village, Belagavi district working on silver anklets. Photos by author 

Artisans in Manguru village, Belagavi district working on silver anklets. Photos by author

A woman crafting silver. Photos by author

Silver in the process of being fired.

On the borders of Karnataka and Maharashtra is a village of silversmiths. Located in Belagavi’s Chikkodi taluk, Manguru has karigars in every house who handcraft silver jewellery, especially anklets (gejje or payal).

With a population of 10,000, the village houses around 200 home-based silversmithing units.

Though many of these artisans are involved in other jobs, including agriculture, they have continued practising the craft of making anklets, toe rings and other silver jewellery that they have inherited from their previous generations.

As per a rough estimate, the village annually produces anklets from around 25 tonnes of silver. Their designs are in demand in several parts of the country.

Evolution of the craft

The craft trickled here from Maharashtra’s Hupari, called the silver city of India, nearly a century back. In the last four decades, Manguru which is five kilometres away from Hupari, has grown into an independent village of skilled silversmiths.

“The craft thrived in Hupari under the patronage of Shahu Maharaj. But it got a major boost when Krishna Ramachandra sonar, a jeweller, shifted his focus from gold to silver jewellery in the early 1900s. Since then, villagers from Manguru and surrounding areas like Barawad and Karagada have been associated with silversmithing,” says Nitin Badde, a third-generation jeweller from Manguru who has researched the origins of jewellery craft in Hupari.

Initially, the village produced only handmade silver chains used in making anklets. They supplied it to artisans in Hupari who then assembled it with ghungroos or gujrav (silver balls) and sold the anklets in different parts of the country. These anklets came to be known as ‘Manguru chains’ among jewellers.

Manguru craftsmen then began producing entire jewellery pieces in the village. The artisans produced four types of anklets including the roopali, gajashree, gajashree chum chum and the sonya.

Roopali is the simplest among them with a single chain and loops, the gajashree has two lines of chains. The gajashree chum chum has loops and ghungroos, and is crafted for children.

“The main feature of our payals is that they are light-weight and are in demand in south Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu,” said Sagar Patil, a retail jeweller from the village.

35-year-old Vinod Patil, another artisan whose entire family is involved in making jewellery, said that earlier, these anklets were sold under the brand name of Hupari but now some villagers of Mangur are marketing them independently.

Though Manguru designs are popular in many parts of the country, localites prefer newer designs. To meet this demand, artisans come up with designs inspired by the jewellery traditions of Agra, Rajkot, Salem and other places.

Handcrafted

Most of the anklets produced in Manguru are either completely handmade or are crafted using simple machines that are hand-operated.

The process begins with artisans procuring ‘bricks’ or ‘biscuits’ of raw silver. The silver is tested for purity at a lab set up in the village. The metal is then melted and mixed with other alloys like copper to make it malleable, based on the specifications of buyers.

The alloy is heated in ceramic containers and poured into moulds to make rods. These rods are then pressed into flat wires called ‘pasta’ with the use of simple machines. The pasta is then crafted into thin silver wires.

The wires are used to make chains of various shapes and patterns forming the base of the anklet. Portions of the wires are also turned into kadi (small loops) and fixed with ghungroos.

To piece the silver work together, artisans need deft hands for soldering. After this, the ready anklets are sent for electroplating to a centralised unit in the village and then polished. The look of the anklets is enhanced by using ‘meenakari’ colours and then packed.

Need for branding

To encourage the craft, organise the silversmiths in the village and provide necessary facilities, the Karnataka government proposed the establishment of a silver industrial park here. The work began in 2015 on 15 acres of land. Unfortunately, the industrial park is not yet ready.

“Just skill is not sufficient to keep the craft alive. Right from procuring raw silver to marketing, making silver jewellery involves a lot of working capital which the poor artisans cannot afford. Demonetisation, floods and Covid also affected the artisans and they are badly in need of assistance,” Badde said.

He added that issuing identity cards to genuine artisans, providing facilities at the silver park and assisting artisans to create a brand name would help keep the craft and industry alive.