A “New” Khojki Inscription

Posted on Sun 05 January 2014 in articles

It’s sort of a reverse Rorschach Test: if I see a blank slate, my mind will fill it with orthographic imprints. Usually ethereal calligraphy, more recently, translucent epigraphy. I’ve always marvelled at the craftsmen who meticulously engrave complex scripts upon marble facades and copper plates; bringing a blank slate to life with visible language. I recently had a chance to materialize my orthographic fantasies.

In early December 2013, I attended an open house at Equinox Studios in the Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle. The artists had flung open the doors of their studios for the public to experience the spaces where inspiration meets the workbench. In one space an artist swung a wrecking ball into massive, ornate glass sculptures. In another, iron-wrights lit up the sky with pyrotechnic displays emanating from giant, intricate lattices and delicate cut-metal trees. While watching these industrial artists cast light and sound into the night, a more silent performance in one corner of the studio caught my ears.

As I walked over I saw stacks of sandstone blocks and people hunched over tables. I peered over the shoulder of a couple and saw them carving the logo of the Seattle Seahawks into one of these blocks. A few feet away, metal workers fed wood into the blazing mouth of a furnace. I watched as a pair of workers reached into the furnace with a heavy metal yoke and extracted a crucible filled with bubbling liquid. Another worker collected finished blocks with carvings and placed them on a metal rack resting upon a bed of black sand. At her signal, the bearers of the crucible inched over to the rack and steadily poured the molten liquid into each block. Further along the perimeter, a worker cracked the cooled blocks to release a metal tile, each bearing an embossed image of what has been etched into the block.

I was engrossed by this process of sandstone etchings being formed into pictographs on steel and nearly forgot about the rest of the open house. Some of my companions wandered onto the other installations as I grabbed a sandstone block and found a spot at the table. I began thinking about what I would want to see wrought in steel. Luckily, my friend saved me from writer’s, um, block by exclaiming “Oh, write my last name in Hindi!”.

For the next 45 minutes I stood hunched over my block, sketching her name first in pencil, then lightly tracing it with a carving tool, then going over the grooves repeatedly until the depths reached a quarter of an inch. Then the devil of details arrived and he sat on my shoulder as I tried to coax the stone to yield curves that resemble those of inked letters. When I finished, I brushed off my shoulder and handed the finished block to my friend, who ran her finger over the grooved of the etched imprint of her name in reverse. Thumbs up. She passed it onto the metal worker, who sprayed it with a graphite coat and set it on the rack. We watched as the two crucible bearers arrived with a fresh trove of molten steel and poured it onto the carving…

The experience at Equinox loomed in my mind. I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to see cast in metal. A few days later it struck me while I was researching variant letter-forms used in Khojki manuscripts while listening to Raageshwari Loomba’s rendition of the Ismaili ginan “Aaye Rahim Raheman” by Imam Begam. I read the ginan in a printed Khojki book earlier in the month:

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I wondered if I could reproduce the letter-forms that Laljibhai Devraj had cut in Germany in 1903 for the first ever Khojki metal types, which he used at his Khoja Sindhi Printing Press in Bombay. I thought it might be nice to do an etching of “Aaye Rahim Rahman”, the ginan which inspired me to think about a Khojki etching in the first place, but that seemed a bit ambitious. After all, I had only done one etching. So, I thought of the next best thing I would want to etch in Khojki…

But first, I would need my blank slate. My friend contacted Alair Wells, a talented sculptress and metal artist, whose studio Tinder Heart Metals at Equinox was hosting the metal working during the open house. I described my idea to Alair, who was excited to help. We produced a wooden cast for the block by using four 2” x 4”s and affixing it to a plywood board. Then Alair cut an 8” x 10” block from a pine board and we fixed that to the plywood. We poured Washington grade 7 white silica into the cast to measure the amount of sand we would need. Then after we placed the silica into a bucket, Alair and my friend mixed a catalyst and bonding agent into it, mixed vigorously for minutes, and then poured the preparation into the block. The 25 lb. sandstone block turned out beautifully:

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Now, I had my blank slate. Then, I chose my tools: a ” nib, a ” nib, and a needle point:

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The first step was to sketch out the Khojki text using a pencil. The text must be etched as a mirror image so that the embossing on the tile will have the correct orientation. I had thought of making a stencil by printing out the Khojki text in reverse and cutting out the letters using a fine blade, but the glyphs of the only Khojki font I have do not possess the sort of modulated strokes I desired for the etching. So, I decided to do a free hand rendering of the text in reverse:

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I then performed an initial etching. I held my breath quite a bit during this part. Unlike writing on paper or composing in typesetting software, you really cannot ‘erase’ or ‘undo’ an erron without having extra silica and bonding agent on hand. I lightly scraped the ” nib over the sketch I made:

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The first phase of the etching of the upper portion of the block is shown below. The grooves are shallow. I would eventually deepen the routes:

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Then time to sketch out the text for the bottom portion of the etching. I could have sketched out the entire text first, but I had a feeling that my palm would just smudge the graphite.

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Below is the first run of the etching:

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I used the broad nib for the text of the upper portion. It produced a very pleasant width and modulation that resembled the style of Khojki I wanted to emulate.

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Etching the tail of a vowel sign:

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For the bottom portion, I used the medium nib.

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I used the needle point to take care of the small details, like the dots and the terminals of letters:

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Working on the details:

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I was concerned about the size of the dots. I feared that if I spaced them too closely, then the molten metal might just obliterate the sandstone in between and I’d end up with a blob instead of three dots:

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Here’s the before picture of the silica block:

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and the after picture:

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And a close up of the text:

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On the morning of New Year’s Eve, I returned the finished block to Alair, who did another pouring in Tacoma that evening. This is how it turned out:

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Exactly the best Khojki text to fill that blank slate!

While I was I developed my proposal for encoding Khojki in Unicode in 2009, I was contacted by Irfan Gowani, who was enthusiastic about the future encoding. We spoke intermittently, but I did not meet Irfan until I returned to Seattle in 2013. During the past year Irfan and his wife Shelina have become wonderful friends of mine. They are inspirational, creative, and lovely people. And they are damned good cooks. One evening, a few days before Christmas, as I left their home after dinner Shelina handed me two jars of homemade quince and fig jam, sourced from the fruit of their own trees. Apart from the kababs they feed me, this was yet another testament of their giving nature. It got me to thinking: what in the world could I offer them as an expression of my friendship?

What else would express my gratitude for their presence in my life more uniquely than an 8” x 10” x ¾” metal plaque weighing 17 lb, which bears the names of their family embossed in Khojki by my own hands?! I have yet to present it to them. But, I have a feeling that it will always remind them of me… especially whenever they need to move it…

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, Irfan and Shelina!

āye rahem rahemān, ab to rahem karoge,
āye rahem rahemān, ab to rahem karoge.

ejī tana mana dhana guru ne arpaṇa kīje
to gināne gināne ginān, ab to rahem karoge.

ejī dāna sakhāvat har dam kīje,
to dāne dāne dān, ab to rahem karoge.

ejī saba ghaṭ ekaja rahemān kīse,
to śāne śāne śān, ab to rahem karoge.

ejī kahet īmām begam merā pīr hasan shāh,
īmāne īmāne īmān, ab to rahem karoge.