In the rural area of the Province the Lohar is still a village menial,
making and mending the iron implements of agriculture, such as the
ploughshare, axe, sickle, goad and other articles. For doing this he
is paid in Saugor a yearly contribution of twenty pounds of grain
per plough of land [105] held by each cultivator, together with a
handful of grain at sowing-time and a sheaf at harvest from both the
autumn and spring crops. In Wardha he gets fifty pounds of grain per
plough of four bullocks or forty acres. For making new implements the
Lohar is sometimes paid separately and is always supplied with the
iron and charcoal. The hand-smelting iron industry has practically
died out in the Province and the imported metal is used for nearly
all purposes. The village Lohars are usually very poor, their income
seldom exceeding that of an unskilled labourer. In the towns, owing
to the rapid extension of milling and factory industries, blacksmiths
readily find employment and some of them earn very high wages. In
the manufacture of cutlery, nails and other articles the capital is
often found by a Bhatia or Bohra merchant, who acts as the capitalist
and employs the Lohars as his workmen. The women help their husbands
by blowing the bellows and dragging the hot iron from the furnace,
while the men wield the hammer. The Panchals of Berar are described
as a wandering caste of smiths, living in grass mat-huts and using as
fuel the roots of thorn bushes, which they batter out of the ground
with the back of a short-handled axe peculiar to themselves. They
move from place to place with buffaloes, donkeys and ponies to carry
their kit. [106] Another class of wandering smiths, the Ghisaris, are
described by Mr. Crooke as follows: "Occasional camps of these most
interesting people are to be met with in the Districts of the Meerut
Division. They wander about with small carts and pack-animals, and,
being more expert than the ordinary village Lohar, their services
are in demand for the making of tools for carpenters, weavers and
other craftsmen. They are known in the Punjab as Gadiya or those who
have carts (_gadi, gari_). Sir D. Ibbetson [107] says that they come
up from Rajputana and the North-Western Provinces, but their real
country is the Deccan. In the Punjab they travel about with their
families and implements in carts from village to village, doing the
finer kinds of iron-work, which are beyond the capacity of the village
artisan. In the Deccan [108] this class of wandering blacksmiths are
called Saiqalgar, or knife-grinders, or Ghisara, or grinders (Hindi,
_ghisana_ 'to rub'). They wander about grinding knives and tools."