The glassmaker’s gesture, the clinking of bangles, and the burning of flesh. The value of know-how, power relations, and the quest for independence among the Shishgarh of Firozabad

This article deals with the professional conscientiousness of the glassmakers of Firozabad, focusing on stories of the elaboration, transmission and dispossession of the know-how of the Shishgarh. This Muslim glassmaking caste from the north of India has an enormous mastery of the skills needed in the century-old production of Firozabad. The accounts given by the Shishgarh show a double dispossession of their know-how: on the one hand from below, when their skills were transmitted outside their community and, above all from above, when they were proletarianised. Their struggles to regain autonomy are a metonymy of the struggles between know-how and industrial capital that run throughout Firozabad.