feeds from sacw.net
print versionBBC
by Ramsha Zubairi
28th October 2022
Firozabad is India’s glass capital, most famous for producing traditional glass bangles. But the city is the source of another treasure – one that’s hidden and extremely hard-won.
"He burned the sari and from it, handed us a thin slice of pure silver," said my mother, describing a moment that had taken place 30 years ago at her home in the city of Firozabad. The man in her story was no magician, but an extractor. Like many similar artisans in my mother’s hometown, he’d go door to door collecting old saris to mine them for their precious metals.
Until the 1990s, saris were often threaded with pure silver and gold, and I remember digging into my mother’s wardrobe, searching for her glittery outfits like treasure. But as she told me, the extractors were looking for something even more valuable than clothing – they were looking for trash, and a kind of trash specific to this city.
So now, to learn more about that seemingly mystical transfiguration of extraction, I was driving back to Firozabad, a city overshadowed by the nearby Taj Mahal (45km west) and better known for being India’s capital of glass bangles than for its precious metals. But as I found out, for some industrious artisans, the city was nothing less than a gold mine – a place where the precious metal once trickled through the sewers.
[ . . . ]
Full text here
