Page:The Industrial Arts of India.djvu/34

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utensils made at Kama!, Amritsa and Lahore, They form the staple of the work in metals of the Panjab, and in every large town he says great quantities of metal vessels, drinking cups, cooking pots, and lamps, in short all articles of household use, are made for local consumption, Amritsar, Ambala, Ludhiana, Jalandhar, all export brass vessels into the hills round the Pan- jab, and up the Cabal valley into Afghanistan, The high brass tree-kke candelabra, with a number of branches bearing little lamps filled with oil, and having a wick in each, are a marked feature in great houses in Lahore, and are known by the name of ckar-dwas , i,e. lamps with four wicks [literally “ lights,” the word diva meaning both light and God],

In Cashmere tin is soldered on copper which has been pre- viously deeply graven over with a diffused floral design, the sunken ground of which is then filled in with a black composition, some- thing after the manner of niello. This pretty work, from Cash- mere, is very rare in England, but Lord Northbrook exhibited a variety of it in three dishes at the Paris Exhibition of 1878. They are studded all over with little raised flowers, which shine like frosted silver out of a groundwork of blackened foliated scrolls, which are traced so delicately as to look like the finest Chantilly lace.

At Moradabad, in the North West Provinces, tin is soldered on brass, and incised through to the brass in floriated patterns, which sometimes are simply marked by the yellow outlines of the brass [Plate 12 bis] and at others [Plate 13] by graving out the whole ground between the scrolls, and filling it in with a blackened composition of lac, as is done in Cashmere.

Benares, in the North-Western Provinces, is the first city in India for the multitude and excellence of its cast and sculptured mythological images and cmblemaia , not only in brass and copper, but in gold and silver, and also in wood and stone and clay. These images of the gods are not made by a separate caste, but the carpenters and the masons respectively make the large wooden