The Man Who Makes It Is Sixty-Three
The karigar who makes Odisha's finest filigree silver earrings is sixty-three years old, and his son drives an auto-rickshaw. This is not a tragedy in the making. It is already made. Across India's jewellery-making clusters, Karimnagar in Telangana for silver filigree, Jaipur for meenakari, Bidar in Karnataka for bidri work, Varanasi for gold taar work, the average age of a master craftsman has climbed past fifty-five. The craft schools that once fed these workshops have closed or shifted to machine-assisted shortcuts. What remains is a narrowing window: the pieces being made right now, by hands that learned the old way, are among the last of their kind at the prices they currently carry.
