In the narrow lanes of Moradabad city, brass once breathed. The morning air used to ring with the rhythms of hammering metal, the roar of furnaces, and the magic of human hands transforming molten fire into filigree. Even the dust had a golden patina. Workers wore soot and sweat like badges of pride.

But now, the sound has thinned. The fire doesn't rage like it used to. Furnaces have gone cold, like the dreams of people who fed them. Rust blooms in corners. The clang of metal has been replaced by the hum of fans over sleeping bodies – men too exhausted, or too jobless, to move. Where once every second household depended on brass, the city now runs on fumes: from furnaces, from outboard engines, from broken livelihoods.

In a dim, ash-scented workshop, a young man in his early twenties, whose hands are marked with burn scars, pours a golden stream of molten brass into a mould. The metal hisses. He barely notices. His numb fingers have gotten used to the burns. A few blocks away in the neighbourhood of Peerzade, a middle-aged man, wearing a local cloth mask, wheezes between words as he polishes a tray; he keeps an inhaler tucked in his shirt pocket. “All of us breathe smoke,” he says, “whether from fire or from fate.” He has been suffering from tuberculosis and has completed a nine-month treatment, only to return to the same thin, poorly ventilated shop.

This is not just an economic decline. It is the slow, steady unravelling of a socially-bound craft under the joint weight of global markets and a changing climate. The people who carried this work across generations, mostly Muslim families from marginalised sections within the community, who lived and laboured in the city’s bylanes, are the ones paying for it with their health, their incomes, and their futures.

Once exported to over 60 countries, Moradabad’s wares now compete with mass-produced Chinese imitations churned out by invisible machines in unknown cities.

The market has not been kind. Machine-made brassware from China, buoyed by state backing, has flooded domestic and export markets, undercutting handmade Moradabad items by as much as 20%. “This isn’t just competition; it’s a cultural threat,” says Noman Mansoori.

Summer is cruel here. The sun presses its weight onto tin roofs. Inside workshops, it’s hard to tell whether the heat comes from the weather or the furnace. On some days, both threaten to collapse lungs. Brass dust lingers on the floor, clings to clothes, coats the breath. It’s not just labour, it’s slow erosion of lungs, of dignity, of history.

And yet, there’s still fire.

This essay isn’t an obituary. It’s a warning. It’s a glimpse of what happens when a heritage economy is allowed to decay in silence, when globalisation, climate collapse, and neglect arrive together, unannounced.

From Mughal Outpost to Brass City:

The city’s identity is inseparable from its brasswork, earning it the name Pital Nagri, or ‘Brass City’. Sultan Ahmed, a veteran from Moradabad and JNU PhD, traces this heritage to Prince Murad Baksh himself, who is said to have brought the craft from Afghanistan along with skilled metalworkers. Walk down Prince Road, where the Mughal prince once strolled, and you still hear it in the alleys emerging from the road: the faint, steady motion of brass through the hands of families who have guarded it for generations.

Moradabad’s story stretches back to the Mughal period and in the slow heat of generations. It is known that before brass, the city used to be a fort town. The town grew around Prince Murad Baksh’s name and the Jama Masjid that Rustam Khan, the Governor of adjacent Sambhal, built beside the Ram Ganga. Over centuries, families clustered their workshops into neighbourhoods; craft knowledge passed like an heirloom.

That pattern, a craft inherited through intimate family networks, concentrated by geography and social status, now works against the people who were once engaged in it. When orders fall and prices spike, those same ties constrain mobility: the most skilled hands are also the ones least able to escape the trade that binds them.

The City That Brass Built

The bulk of daily-wage labour in the brass lanes – polishers, khalbatta operators, moulders, chemical washers, small-scale engravers – are mostly Muslim workers from historically marginalised communities; in Moradabad, 80 per cent of these artisans are Muslims¹. The work is generational, informal, and spatially concentrated in the same narrow lanes where their families live. That concentration makes the health and economic impacts deeply uneven: the smoke lands heavier where these communities sleep, eat and raise children.

Additionally, the summers in north India have become longer and harsher; heat compresses into furnace rooms and under tin roofs. Fuel and electricity costs rise with every heatwave and energy shock. Extreme weather and strained supply chains make raw metals volatile. The result is not just an abstract macroeconomic shift, it is collapsing lungs, rising medical bills, and children pushed out of school.

From these lanes, the city’s handiwork travelled far, crossing oceans to America, Europe, the Gulf. According to the Uttar Pradesh government officials, there are more than 5,000 units in Moradabad engaged in manufacturing of handicraft items, employing an estimated 1.5 lakh labourers.

Smoke, Soot, and the Weight of Caste:

Moradabad’s brasswork has always been a marriage of fire and metal, but the fire now burns heavier. In the city’s unregulated workshops that populate Moradabad’s bylanes, furnaces and chimneys crowd into residential lanes, their smoke settling over homes, schools, and markets. Along the Ram Ganga, wastewater from polishing and casting is dumped untreated, carrying chemicals and metal filings into the river. For those living nearby, air pollution is a daily companion; water pollution, a silent inheritance.

Inside these units, where ventilation is poor and protective gears or masks are a luxury, workers tell the same story that the fine brass dust settles on clothes, in hair, in lungs. Tuberculosis and chronic respiratory illnesses are common; they flare after seasons of intense work and heat, its spread accelerated by the grinding, buffing and polishing that coat the lungs as surely as they coat the finished product in shine.

Large, regulated factories can invest in exhaust systems, wet-sanding, and protective clothing. Small units, the tens of thousands of 200-900 sq ft workshops tucked into alleys cannot. The health cost, then, becomes a private bill for workers and their families.

Religion, caste and class compound the injury. “Daily-wage labourers in this trade constitute more than half, with Muslims from underdeveloped sections, descendants of historically marginalised communities, already excluded from many avenues of economic mobility,” says Noman Mansoori, President of the Handicraft Development Society, Moradabad. The collapse of the brass industry doesn’t just close workshops; it deepens entrenched poverty, pushing families further to the edges of the city’s economy. “In Moradabad, the brass dust settles unevenly, heaviest on those who already carry the most,” he added.

The Geography of Pollution is the Geography of Caste

Pollution does not fall evenly. The dirtiest air, the most contaminated drains, the worst-smelling lanes are where caste marginalised (Pasmanda Muslim) communities, such as Ansaris, Qureshis, Mansuris, etc., live and work, namely Peerghaib, Peerzade, Katghar, Daulat Bagh, Faiz Ganj, etc². That is not accidental; it is a function of how the industry developed: low-capital, labour-intensive processes operated from family courtyards and small rented rooms. Because the people doing the most hazardous tasks are already excluded from many public resources, environmental harms compound existing social exclusion.

“Furnaces and chimneys now line the Ram Ganga,” says a local resident in Katghar. “By evening, the smoke presses down on our rooftops as if the whole city were breathing soot.”

“Pollution here isn’t just an environmental issue, it’s a welfare issue,” says Noman Mansoori, President of the Handicraft Development Society. “But the system only responds with fines. Small units get punished, while no one invests in safer infrastructure. The result is that the most marginalised workers end up carrying both the health risks and the penalties.”

The Price of Metal:

In a cramped baithak in one of Moradabad’s brass lanes in the Peerghaib area, four men sit on chairs, tea cooling in their glasses. The talk circles, again and again, to the same subject, i.e., the fall of the trade, the same calculations: silli (brass bar) prices, unpaid invoices, the next month’s rent.

Nazir Hussain sits hunched, hands folded on his knees. At 67, his eyesight has dulled, but not his memory. He began polishing and electroplating at 13, under the watch of his father and uncles, running his own small firm until 2019. “Now, after heavy taxes like GST, the work is gone,” he said. Big units won’t take him – too old, too slow. His izzat (honour), he says, won’t let him sweep floors or carry loads, and besides, he has never done anything else. A cousin has already left for Nepal; there was no profit left here.

One craftsman’s wife stands by the doorway, counting costs: “Brass costs twice what it did last year. We do the labour but there’s no gold left in it.”

And then there’s Mohd Aamir, who’s shifted from handiwork to driving an e-rickshaw for the past five years, one among nearly 20,000 vehicles flooding city streets. Many of these drivers are former brass artisans. “We used to make for Europe,” he says softly. Now, “we just make enough to eat.” The 44 year old former artisan bought his rickshaw in instalments; no real help came. Government schools sit inaccessible, healthcare schemes are barely existent. “Our children will slip right back into this cycle, either brass or wage work. That’s all they’ll know.”

Raw-material prices have risen sharply in recent years. Locals report silli jumping from ₹80/kg a decade ago to ₹500–₹550/kg today; traders and industry coverage confirm severe spikes in copper and zinc, and record pressure on brass-rod prices in the APAC market. Those increases eat into already-thin margins and force workshops to time orders, borrow, or stop production entirely. Regional reporting has documented a steep fall in brass exports and the migration of orders to cheaper metals. 

The liquidity gap is lethal. Makers pay for materials, labour and GST up front; buyers often delay payment. An export order can take roughly 90 days to execute, and GST refunds where they come take months. Recent policy has tightened rules on buyer delays, imposing interest and reporting requirements for payments past 45 days. But for many small units, the enforcement is too slow, the relief too late. The outcome: artisans forced into informal credit, seasonal migration, or lower-paid daily work.

Children, Schooling and the Widening Poverty Trap

The human cost multiplies when children are considered. Families report schools that are functionally inaccessible either because fees are unaffordable or because children are needed for added income. Without stable schooling, the next generation faces only a recycled set of options: brass work if it survives, or precarious daily labour. One man’s blunt accounting echoed a fear shared across the lanes, “Our children will slip right back into this cycle of brass or wage work. That’s all they’ll know.”

Caste marginalised communities, already marginal in access to many public benefits, also face barriers to credit and government schemes that require formal documentation and collateral. That makes it harder to retool, train, or move into safer, higher-paying sectors.

What Policy Does, and What It Misses

There are multiple policy failures stacked together. Subsidies and rebates that once cushioned exports have weakened; enforcement of environmental and labour standards tends to hit small units with fines instead of offering support to comply; schemes meant for MSMEs often fail to reach the smallest players who lack formal registration. Traders and representatives have repeatedly asked the state for targeted relief, price stabilisation for raw materials, and a tailored assistance scheme for artisans. These appeals persist with little structural change.

Some recent regulatory moves aim to protect MSMEs from delayed payments by penalising defaulters. But rules alone cannot substitute for on-the-ground support: credit at reasonable rates, designated industrial clusters with shared pollution-control infrastructure, training to help artisans shift to higher-value products, and health programmes targeted at occupational illnesses would make a difference.

The Weight of Costs: What We Lose if Nothing Changes

Every hammer strike, every etched motif, now carries a heavier price. Heirloom techniques, once enough to feed families, are straining under the weight of modern expenses. Electricity bills climb faster than orders. Transport duties and freight surcharges cut into already-thin margins. GST on raw materials and export tariffs bite twice first at production, then at sale. The government rebates that once softened these blows have shrunk into a trickle, leaving exporters to shoulder the full brunt. The math no longer adds up

This is not a plea for nostalgia. It is a call to recognise the unequal distribution of harm: the impact is first and deepest on the houses of those who can least afford it. Any intervention that fails to see caste, class and climate as linked will keep missing the mark.

If the public conversation about industrial decline centres only on exports and markets, the human story will remain an afterthought. If we want Moradabad to survive as a living craft city, not as a museum of what once was, we need targeted industrial planning, health and education investments for marginal communities, and climate-aware regulations that help small units transition rather than simply punish them.

One evening in Peerzade, a small flame still glowed inside a shuttered shop. An old man, his hands marked by decades of burns, tapped a tray with the heel of his palm until it made the single, precise sound that announces it is finished. “We made things that mattered,” he said. “We made them with our hands. Don’t let that end because we were poor, and because the world got hotter.”

That sound, a small, defiant tap in a city of cooling furnaces, is the true urgency of Moradabad’s story. If caste/religion/class keeps the workers invisible, and the climate keeps testing the limits of survival, what breaks here will not be only metal. It will be lives.

¹ Gupta, Natalie C. F., (2011), Capital Intensity of Employment, Wage Share Variability, and Income Inequality: Findings from Two Industrial Areas in India, (Doctoral thesis, the University of Manchester) https://pure.manchester.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/360722034/FULL_TEXT.PDF?utm_source=chatgpt.com

² Gurmat, Sabah, (2023, July 27), In India’s ‘Brass City’, an Overwhelmingly Muslim Workforce Stares at a Looming Crisis, The Wire, In India’s ‘Brass City’, an Overwhelmingly Muslim Workforce Stares at a Looming Crisis - The Wire