The process of making bangles

By Pooja Yadav

How the bangles are made?

Bangles are made from glass melted in open-pot furnaces (sometimes, tank furnaces) in a series
of steps that involve special kinds of furnaces and workers with special skills. The basic steps are
briefly described below: Raw materials for glass manufacturing : soda ash, silica , calcite,
feldspar, arsenic etc., These raw materials are fed into the furnace by a conveyer belt from which
the raw materials go into the furnace and are burned there for 12 hours.

First, a worker (known as the gulliwalla) uses a long iron pole to scoop out a glob of molten
glass from the pot furnace at the temperature of around 1300 °C. He races with the glob to a
worker who gives it an appropriate shape somewhat resembling an ice-cream bar. After this the
cone is again heated in a small furnace. Then the glass along with the rod is rushed to another
furnace which has coloured glass and the person there, coats the glass with a small quantity of
coloured blocks of glass that is melted separately in a small refractory container called tali. The
shaped glob is then taken to the sekai bhatti—a furnace fired directly by coal. Here, a worker
known as the sekai walla gives the semi-fused glob of glass a roughly cylindrical shape by
rotating the rod. The belan walla rotates a ‘belan’ machine – essentially a long iron rod – inside
the furnace at a constant speed. The tarkash draws a thin filament of glass from the melt and
places it steadily on the rotating rod, so that the constant turning motion gives the filament a
spiral shape. The muthia uses an abrasive tool to cut off lengths of the spirals at periodic
intervals. The spiral lengths of glass (still hot but now hardened) are collected and sent for
cutting. The cut bangles are tied with strings into bunches. Each bunch contains approximately
320 bangles, and is calleda tora. The bangle bunches are then sent to household units for further
processing into ‘raw’ bangles.