A village needed a blacksmith and a carpenter and it kept them. The lohar made and repaired the plough share, the sickle, the axe, the chaff cutter blade. The tarkhan made the plough beam, the cart, the well gear, the door and the bed.
They were paid under the sepidari or jajmani arrangement: a fixed share of the harvest from each farming household they served, twice a year, rather than a price for each job. That tied them to particular families across generations.
It was not a market and it was not free. The arrangement gave security and it fixed people in a caste position with no exit, and both halves of that were understood by everyone in it.
Tarkhan and Lohar families took the name Ramgarhia in the eighteenth century, after Jassa Singh Ramgarhia, and it is now a caste name across the diaspora.
The arrangement ended with mechanisation and cash. The skills went into workshops, into the Ludhiana machine tool industry, and abroad, where Punjabi artisan castes built the East African railways and staffed British foundries.
A village of any size had one of each and no more, and the position passed from father to son. A household that fell out with its lohar had a practical problem, because the next one was in the next village and would not ordinarily take on somebody else's client.
The tarkhan made the wood: the plough, the cart, the door, the manji frame and the Persian wheel, and the two trades worked on the same objects from different sides.
Jassa Singh Ramgarhia built the fort at Ramgarh outside Amritsar and took his name from it, and the misl he commanded was the one whose sardars came from the artisan castes rather than from the Jats. That a carpenter's son led a misl is the whole content of the name, which is why the name was taken.