Baburam Yadav: Six Decades of Hammering Mooradabad into Global Consciousness

He's 76 now, with hands that move like they're remembering something older than memory itself. 

In 2024, Baburam Yadav received the Padma Shri, one of India's highest civilian honours, for six decades of championing the intricate brass Marori craft, teaching, and refusing to let a 400-year-old craft disappear.

Over a thousand artisans were trained under him. His work has been showcased in 40 international exhibitions. And still, every morning, he sits in his workshop in Mooradabad with a hammer and chisel, doing what he's done since he was a boy.

The Padma Shri doesn't come easy. It's reserved for people who've given their lives to something larger than themselves. For Baburam, that something is Marori. It's a brass craft so demanding that most artisans wouldn't choose to sustain the challenges. But he mastered it. He became its keeper and a living archive.

Pital Nagri,  Where Metal Becomes Memory

They call it Brass City (Pital Nagri). Walk through the old quarters of Mooradabad, in western Uttar Pradesh, and you'll hear it before you see it. The rhythmic tink-tink-tink of metal on metal and workshops humming like beehives. The air smells like coal smoke and polishing compounds.

Every third door opens into a workshop where men sit cross-legged on the floor. They hammer patterns into brass vessels that will end up in homes from Mumbai to Munich.

The Mughals brought Persian metalworkers here centuries ago. And the craft took root in the alluvial soil of this UP town, the way cotton does in the Deccan. During the British Raj, the British encouraged the brassware industry, which became a major export product. Victorian drawing rooms displayed Indian brassware as symbols of the Empire.

Today, Mooradabad's handicrafts industry accounts for more than 40% of India's total handicraft exports. Walk into any 'ethnic décor' section in London or New York, and chances are, the exquisite brass craft came from Mooradabad.

But Baburam doesn't just work brass. He does Marori, a technique so intricate, so time-consuming, that even in Mooradabad it's considered the deep end.

Marori involves creating elaborate designs by pounding the base metal and filling the gaps with resin. This makes the design seem to bloom from the surface. The grooves have to be perfectly uniform. The resin has to be mixed to exact specifications. One mistake, and weeks of work are ruined.

It can take a month (or more) to finish a single piece. There are no shortcuts. There are no machines that can replicate the slight variations in pressure, the micro-adjustments of angle, and the intuitive understanding of how metal responds to force. This is a craft that lives in the hands, not in blueprints.

The Boy Who Learned by Watching

Baburam Yadav was born on 16 February 1949 in Mooradabad, Uttar Pradesh. He started early during his teenage years. His mentor Amar Singh was a master artisan who took him under his wing and taught him not just the how but the why -

• Why this angle for the chisel
• Why this pressure for the curve
• Why patience is the only tool that matters more than skill.

In those days, learning a craft meant sitting beside your ustad for years, watching, absorbing, trying, failing, trying again. 

Baburam was a dedicated student. He had the patience. 

He had the eye for detail. And he had a stubborn refusal to let the craft die with his generation. His sons joined him in the workshop. His grandchildren watch him work now, the youngest ones sitting in the corner, playing with brass leftovers. They would sink in the rhythms of the craft the way Baburam did decades ago.

Over the years, he received recognition for his craft par excellence. The awards piled up, the State Award in 1985, the National Award in 1992, and the Shilp Guru award in 2014. He's been to craft fairs in Germany, exhibitions in Japan, and cultural festivals across the Middle East.

And through it all, he kept grooming the aspiring artists, from young men in neighboring villages to students from design colleges. He even trained competitors. Because he understood that a craft without apprentices is a craft on life support. You can't preserve tradition by hoarding it. You preserve it by giving it away.

The Craft: What Marori Actually Is

Let's get specific. Marori isn't simply 'decorative brass.' It's a technique that requires three distinct skill sets - metalworking, engraving, and resin inlay.

First, you cast or hammer the brass into the desired form - a vase, a plate, a bowl. 

Then comes the engraving. Using a chisel and hammer, you carve intricate patterns into the surface. Floral motifs, geometric designs, calligraphy. The grooves have to be deep enough to hold the resin but not so deep that they weaken the metal. Every line matters.

Then comes the resin. Traditionally, it's made from lac, a natural resin secreted by insects, mixed with colored pigments. You heat it until it's pliable, then press it into the grooves, working quickly before it hardens.

Once it cools, you polish the entire surface until the brass gleams and the colored resin sits flush with the metal. It creates the illusion that the pattern was always there, waiting to be revealed.

The whole process can take weeks. For a large, elaborate piece, it can take months. And every step requires not just technical skill but aesthetic judgment. 

• Where does the eye want to go? 
• How do you balance negative space with ornamentation? 
• When is a design finished, and when is it overdone?

This is why Marori commands respect, even in a city full of brass artisans. 

The Theft No One Talks About

Right now, somewhere in a fancy home décor store or on an expensive e-commerce site, there's a 'handcrafted ethnic brass platter' or a 'vintage-inspired Indian vase.' It's expensive. It's sold as authentic. The product description uses words like 'artisanal', 'heritage' and 'traditional.'

And nowhere…not on the tag, not in the product description, not in the brand story, does it say Mooradabad or Marori or Baburam Yadav.

This is the same con the fashion industry has been running for years.

A European brand does an 'India-inspired' collection, uses block print motifs, uses ikat patterns, uses temple jewellery designs, and calls it innovation. The designer gets profiled in Vogue. The collection sells out.

Meanwhile, the artisans who've been doing that work for generations? They get nothing. Not credit, not money, not even a footnote. It's not homage. It's theft. And it's happening with brass, too.

Marori work is being copied, its aesthetic stripped and repackaged, whilst the artisans who actually create it are erased from the narrative.

Big brands slap 'ethnic' or 'artisanal' on mass-produced goods and charge premium prices. But the makers - the ones whose hands cramp from hours of hammering, whose eyes strain under dim workshop lights, whose lungs fill with metal dust, never see a rupee of that profit.

That's erasure. When you sell 'Indian brass décor' without naming Mooradabad, you're severing the object from its history, its geography, its people. You're turning a living tradition into a decontextualised aesthetic. You're saying the look matters, but the makers don't.

This, precisely, is cultural appropriation. Taking the labour, taking the knowledge, taking the centuries of accumulated skill, and repackaging it as your own.

Today: Survival Mode

Baburam is still working, but the craft is under siege. Cheap machine-made replicas flood the market, often from China, undercutting handmade brass by 70%. Buyers want 'the look' but don't want to pay for the labour. They want something that feels artisanal but costs as little as factory-made.

Today, Mooradabad exports brass products worth about Rs 4,500 crore every year to countries such as Britain, the United States, Canada, Germany, and nations in the Middle East. The industry supports a huge community, with nearly 30,000 to 45,000 manufacturers and around 2.5 lakh artisans involved in making these products.

But the makers remain invisible, silently working in workshops that tourists never see, churning out pieces that get sold under someone else's brand name. And the next generation? They're not interested. Why would they be? 

A young man can spend ten years learning Marori and still make less than someone working in a call centre. The skill doesn't translate into financial security. The prestige doesn't pay the rent. So workshops get shut. Tools get sold. Knowledge that took centuries to accumulate disappears in a single generation.

And yet, Baburam continues to mentor. Because he knows that once the last artisan puts down the chisel, Marori vanishes. No YouTube tutorial can save it. No museum exhibit can bring it back.

Craft isn't something you can archive. It lives in the body, in muscle memory, in the thousand tiny adjustments that happen below conscious thought.

Lose that, and it's gone forever.

Why This Matters to You

When you buy a piece of Marori brass, you're not merely buying an object; you're keeping a 400-year-old tradition alive. You're ensuring that artisans like Baburam aren't erased by algorithms and factory moulds.

Buying authentic means the money goes into the hands that did the work. Giving credit means the culture doesn't get strip-mined by corporations. It's that simple, and that urgent.

Every time you choose handmade over mass-produced, you're casting a vote. You're saying that makers matter. That history matters. That the person behind the object deserves to be seen, named, and compensated.

And you're helping ensure that when Baburam's grandchildren sit in that workshop, there's still a workshop to sit in. That the craft he spent 60 years perfecting doesn't end with him.

TuDuGu connects you directly to artisans like Baburam Yadav: no middlemen, no markup, no erasure. Just craft, and the people who create it.

Bibliography

1. All About UP (2025) 'Mooradabad Facts: History, Heritage, and Economy', 27 June. Available at: https://www.allaboutup.com/districts-of-up/all-about-Mooradabad/ (Accessed: 30 December 2025).
2. Bhardwaj, K. (2024) 'Heroes of Indian Art and Craft: Padma Shree Awardees 2024', MeMeraki, 3 September. Available at: https://www.memeraki.com/blogs/posts/heroes-of-indian-art-and-craft-padma-shree-awardees-2024 (Accessed: 30 December 2025).
3. District Mooradabad (no date) Economy. Available at: https://Mooradabad.nic.in/economy/  (Accessed: 30 December 2025).
4. Elets eGov (2024) 'Padma Awards 2024: Check the full list here', 9 February. Available at: https://egov.eletsonline.com/2024/02/padma-awards-2024-check-the-full-list-here/ (Accessed: 30 December 2025).
5. IndiaPost (2024) 'Baburam Yadav, Takdira Begum receive Padma Shri awards', 23 April. Available at: https://indiapost.com/babu-ram-yadav-takdira-begum-receive-padma-shri-awards/ (Accessed: 30 December 2025).
6. MeMeraki (no date), Mooradabad Metal Craft. Available at: https://www.memeraki.com/collections/Mooradabad-metal-craft (Accessed: 30 December 2025).
7. MyGovIndia (2024) X post, 26 January. Available at: https://x.com/mygovindia/status/1750616282045526110?lang=en (Accessed: 30 December 2025).
8. Padma Awards (no date) Official Padma Awards Website. Available at: https://www.padmaawards.gov.in/  (Accessed: 30 December 2025).
9. The Indian Women's Media Fund (no date) 'In India's Brass City, an overwhelmingly Muslim workforce stares at a looming crisis. Available at: https://www.iwmf.org/reporting/in-indias-brass-city-an-overwhelmingly-muslim-workforce-stares-at-a-looming-crisis/ (Accessed: 30 December 2025).
10. Webindia123 (2024) 'Baburam Yadav, Takdira Begum receive Padma Shri awards', 23 April. Available at: https://news.webindia123.com/news/Articles/Entertainment/20240423/4190464.html (Accessed: 30 December 2025).
11. Safexpress (2024) 'Pital Nagri: Legacy of Mooradabad', Safexpress Blog, 9 July. Available at: https://safexpressblog.com/2024/07/09/pital-nagri-legacy-of-Mooradabad/ (Accessed: 30 December 2025).