The Art of Tazia Making: How Indian Artisans Bring Muharram’s Symbolic

The first sounds of Muharram are not always wails or chants; they are often the gentle snip of scissors, the creak of bamboo, and the whisper of hands folding foil into form. Across Indian cities and villages, tazia makers work quietly in the days leading up to Ashura, turning grief into geometric wonder. For many of these artisans, this ritual is not about profit, but prayer. Every cut, curve, and colour speaks to a shared sorrow passed down through centuries, a silence honoured not with noise, but with the beauty of craft.

Tazias: Sculpting Sorrow into Structure

As Muharram begins, across lanes lit with quiet reverence, large paper-and-bamboo structures start to emerge, some silvered in foil, others painted in striking reds and greens. These are tazias, delicate yet towering tributes to Imam Hussain’s shrine in Karbala. While rooted in Shia mourning traditions, the practice of creating and carrying tazias has, over the centuries, become a shared cultural gesture in India. For the communities that build them, the tazia is both a symbol of sorrow and a form of storytelling, one that brings history, faith, and Indian craftsmanship into public view during the Ashura processions. In many places, its construction is an act of devotion passed down within families, with each artisan infusing their structure with quiet, personal reverence.

The tradition of making tazias in India dates back to medieval times and took a distinctive shape during the rule of the Nawabs and regional Muslim rulers. In 18th-century Lucknow, Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula popularised the custom by commissioning elaborate tazias and building grand imambaras to house them. With time, different regions reinterpreted the form, Rajasthan’s tazias shimmer with mirror work and woodcraft, Kolkata’s bear colonial-style motifs, and Bhopal’s reflect the influence of its ruling Begums. What began as religious homage gradually evolved into a rich artisanal legacy. Today, these structures rise not just as religious emblems, but also as reflections of community memory, artistic innovation, and the quiet endurance of mourning made tangible.

The Sustainable Soul of Tazia Making

In an age where festival waste piles high and plastic decor clutters our streets, tazias still rise with care, crafted not to last forever, but to return, quietly, to the earth. Most are shaped from bamboo, handmade paper, cotton threads, and just enough foil to catch the light without harming the land. In towns like Burhanpur and parts of Old Delhi, artisans are gradually shifting away from thermocol and factory-made plastic, embracing older, biodegradable techniques that have been passed down through generations. It’s not sustainability for the sake of fashion; it is faith made with balance, grief made gentle, and remembrance that doesn’t leave a trace behind.

But these structures do more than honour memory; they put hands to work. Each tazia is a patchwork of labour: bamboo cutters, paper decorators, foil artists, sewists, and painters. In the run-up to Muharram, workshops hum with quiet urgency as families come together to build something sacred. For many, this is more than just seasonal employment; it is the only steady work they have ever known. Young boys learn the craft by watching their fathers, women fold paper or prepare garlands in shaded corners, and elders guide each curve and colour with stories from Karbala. The income may not be large, but the meaning runs deep. In these lanes, tazia making becomes both a ritual of survival and an inheritance of purpose.

Held in Word and Hand: How Literature Remembers the Tazia

Long before a tazia rose from bamboo and paper, it found form in language. In India, where the rituals of Muharram unfold not just on the streets but also in stories, the tazia exists as much in verse as in procession. In the elegiac tradition of marsiya, especially in the courtyards of Lucknow and Hyderabad, Urdu poetry by Mir Anis and Mirza Dabeer turns grief into epic narration. Their words did not just describe Karbala; they made it present. The tazia, within its stanzas, became more than a structure; it was a shrine, a sorrow, a silence carried from one listener to the next. These verses were not meant to be read in solitude but performed, recited aloud in majalis, where language became ritual and mourning moved through meter.

Yet, the tazia’s presence in literature is not limited to formal poetry. It lives in the quieter corners of memory too, in the stories families tell about tazias built by candlelight, about rain-soaked processions, about hands that folded paper while someone recited a noha in the background. In regional writings, in the faded lines of memoirs, even in contemporary fiction, the tazia surfaces again and again, not just as a religious symbol, but as a metaphor for fragility, resilience, and collective remembrance. It reminds us that even what is meant to be let go of, carried through the streets and then buried or immersed, can live on, held gently in language, passed from one voice to another like an heirloom of grief.

A Tradition That Rises, Fades, and Remains

The tazia is not just built, it is remembered. Layered with devotion and shaped by hands that know the language of loss, it becomes more than a ritual object. It becomes a memory made visible. Its beauty lies in its transience, in the way it’s created with care, carried with reverence, and then released with grace. Every tazia holds within it the echo of Karbala, but also the quieter histories of those who built it, their labour, their faith, their stories. It doesn’t need to be preserved to endure. Its power lies in its ability to return to the earth, to the home, to the poetry and traditions that keep its spirit alive. In rising and falling each year, the tazia teaches us that not all remembrance is permanent, but some of it is eternal.