The thatheras of Jandiala Guru make brass and copper utensils by hand, heating and beating sheet metal into shape with hammers, then finishing and tinning it. The craft was inscribed on the UNESCO representative list of intangible cultural heritage in 2014, the first entry from Punjab.
The community was settled at Jandiala Guru in the nineteenth century. The vessels are made for particular uses and have particular names: the gagar, the batta, the tokri, the patila, the kadahi.
Brass and copper cooking has become fashionable again on health grounds, which has helped, but the craft was close to gone by the 1990s. Aluminium and steel took the market, and the young left for other work.
The workshops are in a small area of one town. The UNESCO listing brought attention and some support and did not by itself restore an income.
A hand-beaten brass gagar is one of the very few things a Punjabi village household owned that was made to last a century and often did.
The metal is heated, hammered, annealed and hammered again, and the vessel is raised entirely by the hammer with no mould and no lathe.
Kansa, brass and copper each have their own use in the household, and the tradition holds that food kept in them behaves differently, which is a large part of why the craft is being revived by buyers.
The listing in 2014 brought attention. What it did not bring was a wage that keeps a young person in the workshop, and the number of families still working has kept falling.