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4,600-year-old technique, traced back to the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro, is still practised here exactly as it has been for millennia — wax threads wound by hand around clay cores, fired, broken open, the mould destroyed every single time so that what emerges in metal can never be exactly repeated. Kondagaon is the living centre of Dhokra craft in India, home to more than 150 artisans working a tradition that earned this town its local nickname: Shilpnagri, the City of Artisans.
Dhokra uses the lost-wax casting method: a clay core is wrapped in hand-pressed beeswax threads, then encased in more clay. When molten metal is poured in, the wax melts away and the outer clay mould must be broken to retrieve the finished piece. There is no way to make a second identical copy. The artisan's entire vision exists, permanently, in exactly one object.
According to local tradition, an artisan named Guddan, experimenting in the forest, noticed that beeswax mixed with soil from a termite mound solidified into intriguing shapes. He showed his fellow villagers, and what began as an accidental observation became the origin of an entire craft tradition.
Dhokra artisan Bajrang Kuldip, working in Kondagaon's craft city, has described the financial reality plainly: sales have dipped since the pandemic, younger generations are losing interest in the profession, and brass — the core raw material — now costs ₹450-550 per kilogram. This is not a thriving luxury industry. It is a tradition being kept alive by people who, by their own account, find the work too hard but continue because it is what they know.
The tale of Jhitku and Mitki — a love story rooted in Chhattisgarh folklore involving seven protective brothers and the man their sister married — remains one of the most repeated motifs in Dhokra figurines, alongside depictions of Goddess Danteshwari, animals, and scenes of everyday tribal life.
From shaping the clay core through to the final casting, the Kondagaon Dhokra process moves through twelve specialised steps, using locally crafted tools — chisels, wooden mallets, hand-held presses — many of which the artisans fabricate themselves rather than purchase.
You watch an artisan wind a single thread of black wax around a clay core, strand by strand, his hands moving with the unconscious precision of someone who has done this exact motion ten thousand times before.
He works in an open-sided workshop under a tin roof — no glass cases, no curated museum lighting, just a smelter, bags of charcoal, and shelves of finished bell-metal figurines waiting to be sold. When the mould is finally ready, the firing takes minutes. The pour, once the metal is molten, takes seconds.
Then he breaks the mould open. What emerges — a horse, a deity, a figure from the Jhitku-Mitki story — exists now in exactly this form, for the first and only time, and will never be precisely repeated by anyone, including him.
He sets it down. He picks up more wax. He starts again.
The artisan pours molten metal in twelve seconds. The mould took three weeks. The technique is 4,600 years old.
He sets it down and walks away.
This is the entire emotional contradiction of Kondagaon, compressed into one moment that happens, quietly, in workshop after workshop across this town, every single day. A piece that took weeks of patient, hand-wound wax thread, fired and poured and broken open in seconds — and then the artisan simply moves on to the next one, because that is what the work demands, because the wax mould can never be reused, because every Dhokra piece that has ever existed has existed exactly once.
The artisans who keep this tradition alive are not wealthy. Many earn less in a year than what a single piece might eventually sell for in a city showroom hundreds of kilometres away. Younger generations are drifting toward other work. And still, in workshops with tin roofs and open sides, the wax keeps getting wound, strand by strand, around clay that came from the same earth this craft has always come from.
This is not a museum piece. It is a living tradition, fragile and continuing, four thousand six hundred years old and one generation away from forgetting, depending entirely on whether enough people decide it's worth remembering.
It was here before you arrived. It will be here after you leave — though for how many more generations is genuinely not guaranteed.
— Almanac Field Notes
Uncharted Bastar
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ALMANAC · INNER CIRCLE
Kondagaon is one of 32.
The rest are waiting.
almanacindia.com
ALMANAC · INNER CIRCLE
Kondagaon is one of 32.
The rest are waiting.
almanacindia.com
FIELD ALMANAC · No. 18
A L M A N A C
UNCHARTED BASTAR · CLUSTER E
— 2 —
4,600-year-old technique, traced back to the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro, is still practised here exactly as it has been for millennia — wax threads wound by hand around clay cores, fired, broken open, the mould destroyed every single time so that what emerges in metal can never be exactly repeated. Kondagaon is the living centre of Dhokra craft in India, home to more than 150 artisans working a tradition that earned this town its local nickname: Shilpnagri, the City of Artisans.
— 3 —
Dhokra uses the lost-wax casting method: a clay core is wrapped in hand-pressed beeswax threads, then encased in more clay. When molten metal is poured in, the wax melts away and the outer clay mould must be broken to retrieve the finished piece. There is no way to make a second identical copy. The artisan's entire vision exists, permanently, in exactly one object.
According to local tradition, an artisan named Guddan, experimenting in the forest, noticed that beeswax mixed with soil from a termite mound solidified into intriguing shapes. He showed his fellow villagers, and what began as an accidental observation became the origin of an entire craft tradition.
Dhokra artisan Bajrang Kuldip, working in Kondagaon's craft city, has described the financial reality plainly: sales have dipped since the pandemic, younger generations are losing interest in the profession, and brass — the core raw material — now costs ₹450-550 per kilogram. This is not a thriving luxury industry. It is a tradition being kept alive by people who, by their own account, find the work too hard but continue because it is what they know.
The tale of Jhitku and Mitki — a love story rooted in Chhattisgarh folklore involving seven protective brothers and the man their sister married — remains one of the most repeated motifs in Dhokra figurines, alongside depictions of Goddess Danteshwari, animals, and scenes of everyday tribal life.
From shaping the clay core through to the final casting, the Kondagaon Dhokra process moves through twelve specialised steps, using locally crafted tools — chisels, wooden mallets, hand-held presses — many of which the artisans fabricate themselves rather than purchase.
— 4 —
You watch an artisan wind a single thread of black wax around a clay core, strand by strand, his hands moving with the unconscious precision of someone who has done this exact motion ten thousand times before.
He works in an open-sided workshop under a tin roof — no glass cases, no curated museum lighting, just a smelter, bags of charcoal, and shelves of finished bell-metal figurines waiting to be sold. When the mould is finally ready, the firing takes minutes. The pour, once the metal is molten, takes seconds.
Then he breaks the mould open. What emerges — a horse, a deity, a figure from the Jhitku-Mitki story — exists now in exactly this form, for the first and only time, and will never be precisely repeated by anyone, including him.
He sets it down. He picks up more wax. He starts again.
— 5 —
The artisan pours molten metal in twelve seconds. The mould took three weeks. The technique is 4,600 years old.
He sets it down and walks away.
This is the entire emotional contradiction of Kondagaon, compressed into one moment that happens, quietly, in workshop after workshop across this town, every single day. A piece that took weeks of patient, hand-wound wax thread, fired and poured and broken open in seconds — and then the artisan simply moves on to the next one, because that is what the work demands, because the wax mould can never be reused, because every Dhokra piece that has ever existed has existed exactly once.
The artisans who keep this tradition alive are not wealthy. Many earn less in a year than what a single piece might eventually sell for in a city showroom hundreds of kilometres away. Younger generations are drifting toward other work. And still, in workshops with tin roofs and open sides, the wax keeps getting wound, strand by strand, around clay that came from the same earth this craft has always come from.
This is not a museum piece. It is a living tradition, fragile and continuing, four thousand six hundred years old and one generation away from forgetting, depending entirely on whether enough people decide it's worth remembering.
It was here before you arrived. It will be here after you leave — though for how many more generations is genuinely not guaranteed.
— Almanac Field Notes
Uncharted Bastar
— 6 —
— 7 —
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— 8 —
