The Lost Hands of India

By Sadhika on

The old world does not end with a bang or a riot of sound. It slips away soft-footed, like sugar swirling into warm tea—sweet for a moment, then gone without a trace. 

In the old bazaars, where the sun filtered through lattice roofs like sifted grain, there used to be a man who sold bangles. He called out in that rhythmic singsong that echoed across courtyards like the laughter of a household rich in daughters. His voice is gone now. And the lanes, once littered with women in bright sarees bargaining over glass and colour, lie silent, paved and drained of memory.

In the India that rises now—glass-towered and software-slick, scanning QR codes and air-conditioned into sterility—there is no room for the knife sharpener either, his whetstone wheel clattering behind a rusty bicycle. Now the knives grow blunt and disappear, their edges worn down by years of bread and bone. We don’t sharpen anymore; we replace. 

There’s no place anymore for the puppet master with his wooden stringed gods dangling from a rickety box, as he told stories from The Ramayana to children who now prefer television cartoons in English. Progress came riding an engine, loud and shining. It built towers and paved roads, and no one noticed the silence it left behind. The street dentist packed up his pliers. The puppeteer packed away his gods.

The potter sits beside his cracked wheel, watching the ghost of his own fingers. His clay, once caressed into bowls for rice, now sits unshaped, dry and unloved. In his village, there is a road now. The city has arrived in packages: plastic Tupperware, factory plates, steel with a barcode, and the clay, warm and smelling of riverbed, is forgotten. The earth is no longer in our kitchens. It is under concrete.

There once were men who travelled with oil—sesame, mustard, peanut—pressed fresh in a wooden ghani (oil press) that creaked like an old woman’s bones. People would come out with brass vessels and stand in queue. That man still lives, but the ox is dead, and the wooden press has been eaten by termites. He sits outside the city mill now in a faded dhoti, selling branded pouches of sunflower oil, bleached and refined.

And what of the women who weaved grass mats? The men who made ropes from coir? The village bard who sang of gods and harvests, who could summon the monsoon with a raga torn from the chest of a man who never read of rain in any book, but knew its scent in the soil?

It would be easy to mock them; these old trades, these wandering souls. But something is lost when a country forgets the callouses that built its mornings.

These were not merely professions. They were entire ways of looking at the world. They were the belief that things—possessions, songs, people—can be cared for, can be made whole again. That beauty and utility do not have to be opposites. That even a broken thing has dignity.

The young ones leave. We wear shiny shoes and carry phones, and we must. We must, because the old ways cannot feed the hunger of our stomachs or the restlessness of our souls.

That is the way of the world. It has to be. Still, somewhere in the pleats of a grandmother’s saree, in the rusted tools forgotten in a shed, in the scent of wet clay after the first rain, there is a memory of these trades. These rituals. This heritage.

And if you walk far enough, away from the highways, away from the malls, you might still hear it. The distant clang of a blade being sharpened. The soft thump of clay on a wheel. A voice singing of harvest in a dialect the city never learned. Their sons drive auto-rickshaws or press buttons in factories. Their daughters wear polyester. They do not ask to be remembered. They do not know they are fading. 

When fingers no longer know how to twist jute or carve sandalwood, the forgetting is complete. And then a people must learn all over again—from scratch, from screens, from books written in another tongue—hunting in museums for what once lived in muscle memory. Meanwhile, we city folk sit around tables, boasting of the “artisanal”, the “handmade” as symbols of our taste, hoping that our refinement could redeem what our forgetting has cost. The old crafts become curiosities and what once fed a people now feeds only our nostalgia.

Inspired by my visits to the Banjara markets of Haryana.



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