We left Ekta early in the morning and after a small detour across the Runn of Kutch, we took the night train to Jaipur. We spent a few nice days visiting the Temple and Palace, browsing and buying clothes and just being tourists.

India and Glass

Where is it? Near the Taj Mahal in Agra, 50 km away in a town called Firozabad, everything revolves around glass. There are more than 200 companies which work on the whole glass making process, from start to finish. There are constantly fully loaded wagons being moved across town to the next step in the production process. Discarded materials line the sides of the street and behind every door and under every wobbly chimney you can find a small to medium sized factory. People usually work in three shifts and the halls resemble hoards of ants. Incredibly fast moving hands shape the glass, at times without even looking. Some forms are actually thrown along with the pipe from one glass maker to the next.

We had thought it would be a lot more difficult to gain access to these factories. We were however, really lucky to have found our driver, Saleem, who got us a lot closer to our goal. He drove us to the factories and acted as our navigator, translator and bodyguard, all in one. This was of huge help to us as in northern India there are very few street signs and it can be difficult to get precise directions as people seem quite conservative and speak little English. A pair of trousers with lots of holes in, for instance, can become a hot topic.

Nandini Datta from Goa had set up a meeting with our first contact, at the Centre for the Development of Glass Industry. We were shown the fully equipped centre including a small gallery before he handed us over to a colleague who took us to the first factory.

So we arrived at Sachin Guptas factory (Suhag Kanch Udyog popular exports) where neon lights and front lights for rickshaws were being produced, in a partly manual process. We were fortunate to be there on a day when they changed the harbour, which was amazing to watch as some of the workers were literally fighting with the furnace walls. They poked and prodded the wall with four metre long iron poles until it finally gave way. With the old harbour still glowing, it was loaded onto a small metal wagon and then dragged away by three of the men. The new harbour went in and already the next flip-flopped worker arrived with potato sacks as protective gloves and a makeshift shield of sacks and wet mud. This was the only protection against the incredible heat coming out of the big hole and allowed them to rebuild the wall. All in all this took them half an hour and all the time other workers scurried around pressing out car lights in what seemed like every two seconds.

With the help of our notes from Ekta with other factories names and addresses, one of the Centre workers arranged three other visits for us for the next day. Our driver Saleem took great care and so we reached Shri Durga Glass Works the next morning. They produce the typical decorated Indian glass bangles in all different colours. In general it is quite difficult to gain an overview of everything that’s going on. Only thanks to our guide, who despite an unbelievable noise tried to explain the processes to us, did we understand a little more. We still didn’t manage to understand for instance, how often the two metre long poles are exchanged or how long it takes to produce one spiral of bangles.

What we did get however, was that the glass comes off the pole in a square conical form and passes through countless hands of kneeling workers before it reaches the winding machine which turns it into a metre long spiral. After cooling (without a cooling chamber) the spiral is cut and bundled, and then sent for welding and decorating. At the end we were given a finished bundle. After that we moved on to the next bangle factory and finally on to two factories for blown glass.

These lived up to the typical Indian cliché, whereby the owner of the first factory was by far friendlier and more welcoming than the second one. That didn’t spoil our experience though and we enjoyed watching the busy goings-on. They worked faster than the eye can see; however this doesn’t seem to have any impact on the quality produced.

So finally the long Blog is finished and India has left a deep impression on us.