Cast in Copper

In a world of fakes and fading markets, Kashmiri coppersmiths are holding fire, memory, and craft with unshaken hands.

- Tamana Jeelani

In Srinagar's Zaina Kadal, one shop still smells of charcoal, chalk, and cardamom. A family has worked this fire for three generations. Outside, the world has turned fast and weightless. Inside, Mushtaq Ahmed listens to copper: heavy, slow, and stubbornly alive.

He is 63, born above the same copper shop he now runs. The room is gone. The river behind it still flows. His father’s anvil still waits by the window.

“This is naqashi,” he says, tapping a chisel against a polished surface. The sound is hollow, then firm. “We do it by hand, always have."

His hands bear fine scars, a record of all he's etched, carved, and shaped into permanence. The patterns are not random. They have roots in Persian design, Kashmiri nature, and memory: Flowers, vines, prayers.

Sometimes he adds a name, sometimes a date. The copper, he believes, remembers everything.

Long before machines hummed, Kashmir's copperware was functional art, a presence in every home. Families gathered around a trami to eat Wazwan, fingers brushing over the carved edge. The samovar sat like an elder in the center of every winter morning, hissing out noon chai, green and salted.

Copper bowls cradled food, water, and ceremony. Even death had copper. The tashtnari used to wash the deceased before burial.

They were the vessels of daily life, and held our routines, grief, and joy.

And they were heavy, both in mass and meaning. For generations, the coppersmith community were the custodians of this craft. Their knowledge moved from wrist to wrist, across workshops.

A boy learned by sitting beside his father, watching the angle of his tools, the silence before each stroke. A real piece took days to make, sometimes longer.