Indigenous Glass Manufacture in India: An Ethnographic Approach

The production of glass was a major technological development in the ancient world. It required vast knowledge of pyrotechnology and engineering to build furnaces, to maintain the furnace temperature for weeks, and to be able to mix the correct proportions of raw materials. Archaeologists have spent considerable time and energy investigating ancient crafts to understand ancient communities. The antiquity of glass in India is 3,500 years. Indian glass beads and bangles have been major exports all over the Indian Ocean and beyond for more than 2,500 years. The bulk of the glass available in India was primarily produced from Indian indigenous glass. Although different recipes were certainly used, the major raw material for this glass, called reh, was locally available. The furnace for the melting of reh was developed indigenously and the pyrotechnology involved is an important component of ancient Indian knowledge. The traditional pro¬duction of reh glass was abandoned by the end of the twentieth century. This mode of glass production was certainly very ancient and could have been used even before the beginning of the Common Era. This paper attempts to ethnographically document the production mode of indigenous Indian glass in western Uttar Pradesh, with comparisons to archaeological data. The paper also evaluates the ethnohistorical data based on scientific analyses.