How a Brass Diya Is Made in Moradabad, India's Brass City

A brass lamp is either poured or pressed. Either molten metal ran into a mould packed with damp sand and cooled into the shape, or a flat disc of brass was spun against a steel tool until it took it.

Almost every diya sold in India came out of one of those two routes. Most of them came out of the same city.

Key takeaways

• Moradabad, in western Uttar Pradesh, is called Peetal Nagri, the brass city. Its metal craft has been registered as a Geographical Indication since 2014.
• Casting — dhalai — uses fine sand from the Ram Ganga. Spinning works a flat sheet over a form on a lathe. The two leave different weights, different surfaces and different sounds.
• No single workshop makes a whole lamp. The caster, the turner, the engraver and the polisher are separate karkhanas, which is why one piece can take four to six weeks.
• The most reliable thing to check before you buy is the engraving, not the shape.

Why does one city make most of India's brass lamps?

Moradabad sits on the Ram Ganga, and the river is the reason the trade is there rather than somewhere else. The sand on that stretch is unusually fine and soft, which makes it hold a mould impression cleanly — fine enough to take the feathers on a peacock finial without crumbling. That sand is written into the craft's Geographical Indication as its distinguishing feature, which is a rare thing: usually a GI names a technique or a town, not a riverbed.

The brasswork has been there since about 1600, and it is no longer a village craft. Moradabad is the hub of India's art-metalware exports — a category the Export Promotion Council for Handicrafts counts in the thousands of crores every year, and which dipped very slightly in 2024-25 against the year before. The same council's estimate puts something like forty per cent of India's brass handicraft exports through this one cluster. Lamps, bowls, bells, figures and burners leave it for the United States, Britain, Canada, Germany and the Gulf.

That matters for a reason that has nothing to do with trade statistics. It means the brass diya on a shelf in Ahmedabad and the brass diya on a shelf in New Jersey are, very often, the same object from the same lane.

How is a lamp actually cast?

The caster is the dhalaiya, and the work is physical and hot. Brass arrives as silli, plain ingots, and goes into a coal furnace called a bhatti. Meanwhile a mould box — the sancha — is packed tight with that river sand around a master copy of the lamp, then the master is lifted out, leaving its shape as a cavity.

The molten brass is poured in by hand. It cools, it sets, the sand is broken away and swept up to be used again, and the trimmings go back into the furnace. Very little is wasted, partly from thrift and partly from arithmetic: a caster's whole day rate is worth only a fraction of a single kilo of brass, so the margin in the job lives entirely in not losing metal. Some is lost anyway — roughly three kilos into the air for every hundred cast — and around three hundred grams of coal goes to melt each kilo of brass.

The rough casting then travels. It is mounted on a wooden block at the head of a lathe and turned while chisels and files take off the irregularities. This is worth knowing, because it quietly destroys the tell most people are taught.

What is the difference between a cast lamp and a spun one?

You will often hear that concentric rings on the base mean the lamp was spun. That is not reliable, because a cast lamp is finished on a lathe too, and comes off it with rings of its own. The honest differences are these:

Neither is the better object. They are answers to different questions. A deepstambh with a peacock at the top has to be cast, because nothing else will carry that detail. A plain oil dish does not need casting, and spinning one takes minutes.

Who does the engraving, and why does a lamp take weeks?

Because no one makes the whole thing. Moradabad is organised as a chain of small workshops, each doing one stage and passing the piece on — the same division the metal trades draw everywhere, in which the thathera who makes a vessel and the kalaiwala who lines it are two different men with two different sheds.

After the caster and the turner comes the naqqash, the engraver. He works with fine pointed chisels struck by a wooden thapi, a mallet, usually from memory rather than a drawing. Shallow surface engraving is sada kalam. Deeper chased work is sia kalam, where the cut depressions are filled with coloured lac so the pattern reads dark against the metal and the brass around it looks like it is glowing. Then polishing, and then either a clear lacquer or a plated finish.

That final coat is the one thing worth knowing before the lamp meets a scouring pad, because a lacquered surface is sealed, and the tamarind-and-salt method that works so well on bare brass will strip the coating off in patches instead.

How do you tell, holding the lamp in your hand?

1. Weigh it against its size. Lift it before you look at it. A cast lamp feels like more metal than you expected; a spun one feels like less.
2. Tap the dish with a fingernail. Thin sheet rings. Thick cast metal thuds.
3. Feel where the tools could not go — inside the stem, under the lip, in the back of a deep fold. Casting leaves a faintly granular skin there; sheet stays smooth everywhere.
4. Look for joins. A spun lamp is often made in parts and assembled, so the dish, the stem and the foot meet at seams you can find with a fingertip.
5. Read the pattern, not the shape. Follow one engraved band all the way round. Hand-cut lines wander a little in depth and spacing because each one is a separate blow. A stamped pattern repeats exactly, every time.

That fifth one is the test that actually decides most purchases, and it costs nothing.

Does any of this change the lamp you light?

Not in the way that matters. A thin spun diya with a cotton wick in it does the job a diya is for, and nobody at the shrine is grading the wall thickness.

What changes is how it ages. A cast lamp will take decades of heat and cleaning and stay itself. A spun one will dent, and the thin metal at the curve is where it will go first. Neither fact makes one of them more suitable for a shrine — it just means that when a brass lamp gets handed down through a family, it is usually a cast one, because that is the one that survived being used.

And it is worth knowing, when you pick one up, how many pairs of hands it passed through on the way to the shelf. The man at the furnace, the man at the lathe, the man with the mallet, the man with the polish. None of them made a lamp. Between them, they made yours.

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