The Shavings Become Incense — 225 Years of a Craft, 80 of Them in One Family

In 1946, a man named Meeran opened a toy workshop in Channapatna, a town in Karnataka, in the south of India. Eighty years later his grandchildren are still at it. The workshop is called Meeran Art & Crafts, and they are the third generation.

The craft they inherited is older than the family by about a century and a half. Channapatna has been turning and lacquering wood for roughly 225 years. As the workshop tells the story, it began when Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore, brought Persian artisans to teach local woodworkers the art of lacquer-turning. The family did not start the tradition. They joined it, and then they kept it.

Turned and lacquered pieces in Channapatna, Karnataka — Meeran Art & Crafts

The wood is aale mara — ivory wood, Wrightia tinctoria — soft enough to be shaped on a hand lathe and hard enough to survive a child. Sandalwood and rosewood turn up occasionally. The colour is lac, a natural resin, worked together with vegetable dyes. The technique the craft is named for is lacquer-turning: the colour goes on while the piece is still spinning.

The colour goes on while the piece is still spinning

Then there is the detail that is hard to forget. The shavings and chippings that come off the lathe are not swept into a bin. They are collected, and they are made into incense.

What comes off the lathe is collected, not swept into a bin

That is not a line someone thought up for a brochure. It is how the town has always worked — doing what we now call sustainability about two centuries before anyone needed a word for it.