Technology and Culture among the Iron Workers of Bihar during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract

This paper focuses on the mining and metallurgical technology in Bihar in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This technology was integral to the traditional life of craftsmen and the key to under standing their culture. It analyses the craft production systems, market ing and financing patterns within which the iron workers operated. The paper seeks to explore a rather obscure area of past experience— the social and cultural ethos of the iron workers' community and to reconstruct their 'mindset', 'values' and the 'worldview'. Using various categories of oral traditions like proverbs, folk songs and tales, myths and popular literature, this paper emphasises that the cultural com plexities of the world of the iron workers had a rich symbolic content, with an underlying coherent and articulate philosophy of their own.