The souvenir that Prime Minister Narendra Modi carried back from Belagavi on Sunday was a statuette of valiant queen Channamma of Kittur made by the Bidri artisans of Bidar.
The queen who fought the British in 1824, 33 years before the first war of Indian independence, was born in a village in Belagavi district. But her stunning image in silver inlay on a black surface, was made using the soil of Bidar fort, 500 km away.
A team of six artisans led by Mohammad Abdul Rauf, national award winning craftsman, have been chiseling out 140 images of the queen for nearly 100 days now. They have spent hours working in the 100 square feet work shed doing jobs like starting from melting copper and zinc to form an alloy, create a master shield, prepare its copies, etch drawings on them, hammer silver into the slits and treat it with the soil from the Bidar fort, to give it a permanent black colour.
Though the artisans work in an assembly line method, each statuette takes three to four days to be completed. Mr. Rauf has sold the images to a Bengaluru-based jeweler for around Rs. 3,000 a piece. He does not know at what cost the souvenirs have been supplied to the KLE society whose centenary celebrations Mr. Modi attended.
Sadly, Mr. Rauf did not know that one of the souvenirs was meant to be given to the Prime Minister, till some one told him in the morning. The artisan, who can read Urdu, said that the newspapers he read had not covered the event. "My friend told me a Kannada paper had carried the picture of the PM receiving the souvenir and since he had seen me working on it, he identified it. We are very happy that the Bidri artifact will find a place in the Prime Minister’s office," he said. "When Mr. Modi addressed a campaign meeting in Bidar in 2014, he had said he would address the problems of Bidri artisans if elected to power. We hope he remembers his promise," Ashok Ram, another Bidri artisan who works with Mr. Rauf, said.
