Old Marwari Sanduk, Iron Clad Chest

For hundreds of years the merchants of Marwar kept what they owned in a box, because there was nowhere else to keep it. The seth's gold, the account books, the jewellery that came with a daughter, the deeds to the shop, all of it went into the sanduk and the sanduk went wherever the family went, on a camel across the Thar to the ports of Gujarat, on a bullock cart to the new market town and later on the train to Calcutta and Bombay when the Marwaris built the trading houses that still carry their names. A chest like this was the bank, the safe and the dowry box of one family, all in the same piece of iron and wood. When the first real banks opened, the sanduk did not go anywhere. It stood in the haveli and held what the family did not trust to anybody else.

How The Smiths Built It

2 trades made a sanduk and they still do. The khati built the box first, plain planks of local wood jointed into a carcass with a lid and then the lohar took it and did not leave a finger's width of wood showing. Flat iron plates over every face, iron straps over the plates and every strap riveted through to the wood, so that a fire would char it and a thief with a knife would get nowhere. Then the peetal, the brass rosettes, set in rows along every strap, dozens of them, hammered from the back so each one stands up like a small flower. The rosettes were the smith's way of turning a piece of armour into a thing a bride could walk behind. The long iron hasp at the front drops over a loop, a padlock goes through the loop and that padlock and it's key were the whole security of a household.

The Marks On This One

This is a genuine old sanduk. It has the rust bloom along the straps where the monsoons have got at the iron, the dents from being lifted and dropped and dragged from one godown to the next and a chalk mark on the front in somebody's hand from a warehouse that is probably gone now. None of it has been cleaned off. A sanduk that has been polished bright has had it's history scraped off with the rust and this one still has all of it.

• Wooden carcass wrapped fully in riveted iron plates and straps.
• Rows of brass rosette bosses over the iron.
• Long iron hasp and loop for a padlock.
• Bracket feet cut from the iron.
• Genuine old piece, unrestored, marks and rust left as found.