Family heirloom from Bihar, India: Kajrauti Kohl container with a steel body and brass handle in a paisley shape. Photo by Amrit Sufi on Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
As I was going through images of Asian kohl containers on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website, I looked for details that would place these objects in the context of the people and environments in which they were created and used. I found none. The MET’s description of a specific duck-shaped kohl container lacked details about its creator, its operating mechanism, its intended user, or sensory nuances like how it would fit in one’s palm, its weight, or the smells associated with it. I have been passed down a similar kohl container (kajrauti in Angika) made in the 1960s, and it made me aware of how the lack of these kinds of information is proportional to ignoring the relationships that create and sustain them.
This lack of descriptive metadata made me wonder how we can do justice to historical knowledge. To truly understand an object, we need its biography: its creator, the inspiration behind its design, its sensory history, and the people — the creators and users who are usually invisible if they belong to the common, working class. It was at this stage that I began to investigate how the design and material of everyday objects are profoundly informed by geography, purpose, and culture.
This invisibility extends from global museums to local records. The final post-independence 1962 gazetteer of Bhagalpur in the Indian state of Bihar (the area covering the Banka district, where my family’s objects find their home) does not mention these containers of daily life. For clarity, gazetteers were used in South Asia during colonial and post-colonial times, as well. They carried information on geographical makeup, social statistics and physical features of a region and can be used to understand the region’s cultural history. While the gazetteer details tools of outdoor, visible labour such as agricultural equipment, it ignores domestic items like kajrauti, maliya, and paila (objects I will describe further), emphasizing sources of economic benefit over everyday culture. Because women primarily use these items in domestic settings, the scarcity of documentation reflects a broader ignorance of women’s skills and labor.
Kohl bottle shaped like a duck made of Iron; cast and engraved, gold overlay, inlaid eyes (17th-18th century). Gift of Arthur Jaffe, 1976. This object is part of the Met Museum’s Collection. Public domain.
This inspired me to collect data about the everyday items in my own household that have become family heirlooms and make them available on open knowledge platforms like Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource. It clicked: I could collect these missing details about the kohl container and other objects in my own home. Where the museum sees a static “duck-shaped kohl container” from an unknown 19th-century workshop, I see a lineage of working-class hands.
The heirloom objects
The Kajrauti (kohl container)
When I stumbled upon the duck-shaped kohl container on the MET website, it allowed me to connect a kajrauti my mother had gifted me to the Mughal history of India. I sat my mother down and recorded our family history. She told me that the Kajrauti was made by her maternal grandfather, who worked at a steel factory. He made it at his workplace and gifted it to my nani (grandmother) upon the birth of my mother. My nani later gifted it to my mother when she married, who then passed it to me when I was an 18-year-old leaving home for higher education — a privilege of literacy and choice that my nani never had.
Though I have not been wearing kajal recently, I still open the container to smell the kohl my mother made at home by depositing lamp soot under one of the flaps and mixing it with ghee. The container fits in my hand like a small mango. Its paisley shape makes me wonder about the continuation of this ancient Indo-Iranian motif from historical eras straight into the 20th century and modern Indian objects. The object’s life doesn’t end when it is made; its meaning changes as it passes from a grandfather’s factory to a granddaughter’s college suitcase. I am not just taking photos; I am tracking tactility (how it fits in the palm like a small mango), smell (ghee and lamp soot), and sound (the snip of the separating flaps).
The Paila (Grain measuring utensil)
Paila, a kitchen utensil used to measure rice in Bihar, India. Photo by Amrit Sufi on Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Reusable containers, used through generations, are central to the lifestyle of Angika speakers. “Ee ki chhe?” (“What is this?”) I remember asking my grandmother as a four-year-old, watching a “paila” glinting in her palm as she dipped it into a tin to measure out rice for guests.
A paila usually has a capacity of 500 grams (18 oz) or 600 grams (21 oz), enough to measure a family’s lunch. But what fascinated my childhood self was its embossed pattern of scorpions and fish. These motifs trace back to my earliest sensory memories: the taste of fried hilsa fish, and the fear struck by scorpions lurking in unsuspected corners like mango tree branches, roofs, and bamboo gates.
Living in an environment where children had to be taught the dangers of nature, it makes sense that these patterns became common on the surfaces of our containers, as well as on people’s skin. For instance, the scorpion is a common traditional tattoo motif in my home district. It is known locally as godna (derived from the Angika word god, meaning “to pierce”) and is etched onto the hands and feet of local women. While seen on married women of older generations to increase attractiveness and celebrated in local folk songs about the beautiful “Liliya” (the fictional Angika-speaking woman representing youthful defiance of convention in matters of love and marriage), the newer generation is not sporting it as much.
This visual overlap is no coincidence; the paila itself is crafted and sold by the Gulguliya, a nomadic tribe of Bihar. They traditionally move across regions, earning their livelihoods through hawking utensils and tattooing, meaning the very hands that brought the brass container etched with scorpions also pierced them into the skin of the community.
The Maliya (oil container)
One of the most tangible memories of my late grandmother is the maliya, an open oil container she would often look for on colder days.
Maliya is an open oil container that is used for massages, usually made of iron. Photo by Amrit Sufi on Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
This small container is practicality personified, showing exactly how daily functional needs shape a solid object. Designed for heating oil over an open flame and dipping fingers into it before applying it to one’s limbs, it features an inverted dome-shaped area to store the oil and a long handle that lets a person hold it without risking burning their skin.
My mother gave it to my aunt when she was raising her baby; it was returned, to my relief, when the baby grew up. Sharing such objects is a common practice among families and represents a network of care.
By documenting its picture and collecting information on its appearance, I can see how the region, the people, and the intended everyday usage completely dictated its material, shape, and handling.
Call to document and share your culture
Who makes these items, who sells them, and who uses them reveals a great deal about the caste, class, and gender dynamics of Indian society. These domestic objects were never meant to be disposable; they were designed to be created as well as mended by the local lohar (blacksmith) when damaged, shared with extended family, gifted upon the birth of a baby, and used over generations. One can map an entire social ecosystem through them: they are manufactured by working-class men in factory settings or by blacksmiths at home, sold by feri-walahs (traditional street vendors) roaming rural areas on motorcycles, and used by women in domestic spaces.
When these jobs become unprofitable or unsustainable enough to be abandoned, the skills related to them disappear too. We lose the art of locally manufactured measurement tools, the knowledge of making cosmetics from readily available domestic materials, and the creation of mindful containers built for everyday ease of use.
Knowledge is contained in various forms, from encyclopedic articles to a regional word that has no equivalent in another language. The everyday things around us carry this knowledge. They tell us how families function, what skills are useful in local life, and how economic dynamics blend with available materials, food, and comfort. People now use mass-produced kohl packaged in plastic pencils and use plastic mugs to measure rice. When traditional objects go unnoticed — sacrificed to the homogenization of mass-produced plastic products in favor of affordability and access — it leads to the sidelining of a rich cultural knowledge system that served an ecosystem for generations.
Accepting mass-produced articles as an inherently “better” choice disregards objects that are beautifully well-knit into the culture of a place. At the same time, the unavailability of information about such objects further solidifies the tendency to overlook them. However, with access to digital skills, people can now share material culture publicly. By recording oral history of and uploading media of local equipment, containers, knowledge systems, and oral cultures onto open knowledge platforms like Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, Living Dictionary, and storytelling via Global Voices, we can enrich them with the metadata they deserve: descriptions, regions of use, and the beliefs and practices around them.
Contact me via my Global Voices profile if you want to have a deeper discussion about how to take action to make these everyday objects visible.
