Nine Lives(78)

Next to it was another desk, where one of Srikanda’s elder brothers was busy kneading, smoothing, cutting and rolling a length of wax into what would soon be a deity’s arm. The moulding took place with incredible speed, and with the ease of a child playing with plasticine. It seemed to be done entirely from memory: no pattern book or model lay open to guide him. When it was nearly done, and the fingers worked into the appropriate mudra, Srikanda’s brother held it in his left hand and began to finish modelling its curves with a hot scalpel. This he replaced every few minutes from a selection of chisels up-ended in a charcoal fire-pot at the edge of the workbench. As he gently caressed the wax with a series of quick strokes from the flat, hot blade it first liquefied, then vanished, with a sizzle of wax and a puff of fragrant resin.

On the floor at the other side of the room sat eight cross-legged workers, all stripped to the waist, chipping, filing, finishing and decorating the cast bronzes. One boy was busy polishing with a bottle of Brasso and an old rag; another rested the head of a nearly completed goddess on a wooden chock while he worked on her bangles and armlets. All around the workers were ranks of gleaming bronze idols in various stages of finish, some dull and leaden-looking, fresh from the furnace, others shiny and brassy new, while a few were of the same darkly muted gunmetal grey as those in museums.

The room beyond—which opened onto a yard and a cow byre at the back—was the part of the workshop that contained the furnaces, and was surrounded on all sides by a litter of slag and broken moulds. Here two men were calmly engaged in covering one of the wax models in a clay mud pack, while a third was embalming a finished mould in a lattice of wire, ready for firing.

Opposite them, only a short distance away, a pair of sweating dark-skinned and barefoot workers were stoking a furnace set in the mud floor, while a third worker fired it up with a pair of enormous bellows. Into this ever-hotter furnace, the two stokers were shoving old scrap—a series of crushed bronze lota pots, pieces of copper wire and brass plates. The temperature was very high, and orange, green and pale yellow flames shot out as the inferno was fed.

Then, as I watched, one of the two stokers took a crucible of molten metal from the furnace and poured it into the mouth of the waiting mould, the glowing green liquid metal pouring as easily as water from a kettle. To one side of this furious furnace scene lay a garland of fresh marigolds, remnants of the puja which had preceded the beginning of the casting, while beyond, two cows were chewing the cud.

Srikanda joined me there, explaining that the cows’ role was to provide milk for pujas and to create an auspicious and appropriately Hindu environment. He then demonstrated the lost-wax process by which the bronzes were made. He showed me how, just as his ancestors used to do, he first made a perfect model of a god in a soft and pliable mixture of beeswax and resin; how the model was encased in a fine-grained clay made from the Kaveri alluvium, tinctured with charred coconut husks and salt, then left to dry in the sun for a week. The clay mud pack, he explained, was then buried and heated in such a way that the wax ran out, leaving a mould into which the molten bronze was then poured—a process he compared to conception, with the mould taking the place of the womb for the future god, and the slag that of the blood and afterbirth, with the sculptor as midwife and wet nurse. Ten minutes later, the mould was broken open and the sculpture of the god was waiting, ready for the beginning of the process of finishing.

As he spoke, the two workers who had poured the liquid metal into the mould now placed it into a vat of water to cool it. Then they began to break the mould open. “This is the most magical bit,” said Srikanda as we watched, “and the most unpredictable. You do not know whether the casting has worked until this moment.

Gently tapping with their hammers, the two men broke away the clay, so that the head, leg and trident of an image of Kali began to take shape amid the mess of fused mud. It felt slightly like watching an archaeological excavation, as a familiar object emerged from the earth through the careful prodding of the specialists. “The finishing which follows this is the most arduous part of the process,” said Srikanda. “For a large idol, this alone can take as long as six weeks.”

This, he added, was the only point at which he believed their technique diverged from those of the Chola master casters: so fine and skilled was the work of their Chola forebears, said Srikanda, that their pieces needed virtually no finishing after they emerged from their moulds. Today, he said, somehow there were always flaws, and the idols emerged from the casting in need of much smoothing and polishing before they would be ready for the eye-opening ceremony. Somewhere along the generational line of Chinese Whispers, the secret of flawless casting had been lost.