Dying Stories of Purani Dilli: A Century of Writing on Stones (EP-02)

In the second episode of Dying Stories of Purani Dilli, we meet the brothers whose family have been engraving on gravestones for over a century.

Most of the gravestones in the graveyard of Old Delhi have the engravings by the Ilyas brothers. The youngest brother, Mohd. Ilyas explains the process of how writing on gravestones with utmost ease. He sits in the middle while the other two are engrossed in hammering of the stones to get the text made. The eldest brother gets the stone slabs from the market and the fingers as well as the hammer work in tandem to get the desired engraving on the stone.

One of the hammers used while engraving is so old that it has thumb imprints from where you hold it. They predict it to be more than 200 years old. One of the brothers state that the next generation doesn’t see this work as a profession for them as it requires a lot of time and precision. The present generation is all about getting things done fast. No one from the family wants to engrave stone and do calligraphy on them after these brothers.



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