The last goldsmiths of Tantibazar

The afternoon light was fading over Tantibazar, but Gopal Chakraborty had yet to make a single sale. He sat in his narrow workshop — the same workshop where he had once been someone else's apprentice. He waited. The customers did not arrive.

"When gold was Tk50,000 a bhori," he said, referring to the South Asian unit of weight equal to roughly 11.66 grams, "we could still manage."

That was in 2021 and 2022. When the price climbed to Tk70,000, he said, he first saw the storm clouds gathering. Now, in 2026, 22-carat gold has nearly touched Tk250,000 per bhori. For a man who has spent 59 years of his life shaping the glittering metal with his hands, the number is almost incomprehensible.

Gopal's story begins in 1968, when he was 11 years old and, by his own admission, a troublemaker with little interest in school. His father apprenticed the boy to a skilled gorit artisan — a foundational craftsman — at shop no. 5 at the Tantibazar Market in Old Dhaka. 

It was a decision that would define the rest of Gopal's life, threading him into a tradition that stretched back generations and was now, slowly and irreversibly, unravelling.

The anatomy of a lost craft

To understand what is being lost, one must first understand what once existed.

Gold jewellery-making in Bangladesh's Tantibazar was never a single craft; it was a chain of specialisations, each artisan a link. 

The gorit craftsman came first. He was the one who melted raw gold, rolled it into sheets on a spinning chakki, packed moulds, and gave bangles and ornaments their basic shape. 

From his hands, a piece would pass to the naqsha artisan, who etched the designs. 

Then came the chilai worker, the polisher, and, somewhere in between, those who smoothed rough edges, applied enamel (mina), and set stones.

"Traditional methods had always left some room for cutting corners. Some cheating was possible in the old way. Now that there's an alternative, and no labour cost on top of it, interest in foreign jewellery is growing. Many artisans have already left the trade. Some run grocery shops. Some work as salesmen in clothing stores. Some have gone abroad."

Nikhil Roy, Jeweller

The tools of that era had the satisfying weight of things built to last: tongs and pliers, chisels and drills, hammers and anvils, brass bowls and measuring scales, whetstones and hand brushes. They were simple instruments in the hands of people who were not simple at all.

In those days, a single heavy ornament — two and a half to three bhori of gold — could take four to five days to complete as it moved through four or five pairs of hands. The jewellery itself was extraordinary in its variety. 

A bride could be adorned from crown to toe: tikli on the forehead, mukut (crown) on her head, jhumka on her ears, the magnificent sitahar necklace — which looked right only when made with seven bhori of gold — adorning her neck, along with chikhaar and kanthachik. 

On her arms were hatpata, mantasha bracelets, bauti on the upper arms, and mayurpankhi bala — the peacock-winged bangles. A mantasha could weigh no less than two and a half bhori. A mukut might require six or seven bhori to be worthy of the occasion.

These were not luxury items for the elite alone. Gopal remembers the old Dhaka kuttis — the old-city families — who saved and commissioned jarao jewellery sets with a kind of religious devotion. Among Hindu communities, a wedding was simply unimaginable without gold. The Saha and Ghosh families were known to adorn their daughters with 10-15 bhori of ornaments before sending them to their new homes. In the 1980s and 1990s, launch boat owners from Sadarghat, cloth merchants from Islampur, and spice traders from Shyambazar — all of them kept Tantibazar's furnaces burning.

Mastering the art of the cut

Young Gopal, it turned out, had no patience for gorit work. What captured him was cutting — the delicate, precise art of incising designs into gold. His father took him to Idris Ali, the son of Abul Kashem, a master cutter from Kumartuli. Abul Kashem had come to East Pakistan during the Partition, originally from Banaras, and he carried with him the fine, intricate techniques of Mumbai's artisans — a style of almost supernatural precision.

Under Idris Ali's son Ismail, Gopal trained for three years. He spent another three years back in Tantibazar. By the end of it, he was no longer an apprentice but a craftsman's assistant, earning a daily food allowance for the first time. It was a rite of passage in a world with its own economy and honour.

Pieces that once took four to five days and four pairs of hands to complete, now increasingly displaced by machine-made imports. Photos: Rajib Dhar

The old payment system was its own kind of poetry and pragmatism. For every bhori of gold worked, artisans shared two "ana" (a traditional unit). But much of that was not pure wages — it was an accounting of loss. Six rati made one ana. In shaping a piece, the gorit artisan would lose one rati to bhangaree — the fine gold dust that scattered and could not be recovered. 

Through naqsha, chilai, polishing, and finishing, the remaining five rati would similarly dissolve into the air and the floor. What was left — one ana — became the craftsmen's wages, distributed among them. Larger lump-sum payments came from the mahajan, the workshop owner, paid every three or six months, sometimes once a year at the halkhata — the ceremonial reopening of account books.

Artisans, Gopal noted, had grown accustomed to this rhythm. A large sum arriving all at once meant you could repair a leaking roof or buy your daughter's husband a watch and a bicycle.

When machine becomes a threat

The real disruption, Gopal says, came in waves. Prices began climbing after independence: Tk2,500, then four, then five, then Tk7,000 per bhori. Through the 1990s, gold stayed roughly within Tk10,000. By 2005, it had reached Tk12,000 to Tk13,000. 

In 2010, a sharp jump took it to Tk42,000. Then Tk50,000. Then, after Covid-19, it lurched upward in leaps — Tk70,000, then in July 2023, it broke through Tk1 lakh for the first time. Since then, it has barely looked back.

But price was only one part of the transformation. Technology arrived alongside it. Laser-cutting machines now do the work of twenty artisans simultaneously. Electric furnaces, ring-sizing tools, wire-thickness gauges, wing machines — the workshop of 2026 looks almost nothing like the one young Gopal entered in 1968. 

"I've heard," he said, with a kind of bemused disbelief, "that in Dubai and Singapore, you put in a gold bar at one end and a finished ornament comes out the other — melted, polished, and cut — all by machine."

And that foreign jewellery now floods the showcases of Tantibazar's showrooms. Gopal is proud of what his hands can do. "Their designs are all the same," he said. "We can make whatever the customer wants." But handmade work takes time and costs more. Customers have grown impatient with bespoke pieces. They want ready-made. They want hallmarked jewellery. They want certainty of weight and purity, which imported machine-made jewellery reliably provides.

Nikhil Roy, Gopal's neighbour with 30 years in the trade, was blunt about another problem: traditional methods had always left some room for cutting corners. "Some cheating was possible in the old way," he admitted. "Now that there's an alternative, and no labour cost on top of it, interest in foreign jewellery is growing." He paused. "Many artisans have already left the trade. Some run grocery shops. Some work as salesmen in clothing stores. Some have gone abroad."

The logic is brutal in its simplicity: Tantibazar now has more than 2,500 gold shops — a number that has grown enormously — but the workers inside them are mostly salespeople and businessmen, not craftsmen. Apprentices are still coming, Nikhil acknowledged, but not in meaningful numbers. "This is now a full commercial operation," he said. "There is no artistry or affection left in it the way there used to be."

The last orders

In a small factory in Mirpur, Ram Rajbanshi is filling a thirty-piece order for panpata lockets — pan-leaf-shaped pendants — for a showroom in Muktijuddha Market. Each piece contains between one and one and a half ana of gold. Within that tiny quantity of metal, he must raise a design, apply chilai work, and polish it to a finish. He is skilled, and he knows it.

Ram speaks with particular tenderness of the garment workers who used to be his most loyal customers — women who saved over four to six months to pay off small ornaments of four to six ana. They are gone now. "Gold has gone beyond reach," he said simply.

When asked how long he could hold on, Ram was resolute, if not optimistic: "Learning this took time. I suffered to learn it. I don't know any other work. I have to survive somehow."

Gopal, when asked the same question, was quieter. "Any day, I might have to leave," he said. "Electricity bills, water bills — just opening the shop costs money. That's the situation."

According to the Bangladesh Jewellers Association, in 2026, Dhaka alone once employed around 15,000 gold artisans. That number has fallen to between 4,000 and 5,000 in just a few years.

And with them disappears something that cannot be retrieved by any machine: the accumulated knowledge of sitahar, mantasha, mayurpankhi bala — ornaments whose names are already becoming unfamiliar, designs whose secrets live only in the hands of men like Gopal Chakraborty, ageing quietly in a lane that was once called Donkhana, because wrestlers used to train there, and the whole city used to come to buy gold.