Chilaram had been established in the Kalbadavi ward ever since its introduction sixty years before. One of the most intelligent craftsmen at present in the trade is Framji Hirjibhai. In Surat there are thirteen families of inlayers, of whom eight are Parsis and five Hindus. Tin wire is used in the work in Western India instead of brass, as in Persia, where also it is always varnished. The same inlaid work is made in Egypt and Algiers, and it is similar to the tarsia or marquetry of Italy and Portugal, and the Roman work known as opus cerostrotum . It is also, I believe, identical with the inlaid work of Girgenti and Salerno, although in this the patterns are floral, and not geometrical, for I found by a comparison of the two varieties in Paris, that there was not a single geometrical pattern in the Bombay work which cannot be traced back to a flower in the work of Girgenti and Salerno. The Egyptians also obviously worked in tarsia. The art is said to have died out of Europe, and to have been again reintroduced at Venice from the East. More probably it remained an un- broken tradition in the Mediterranean, and was revived by the Saracens. At Goa, rare old caskets, coffers, and other examples of it, of the same style as the Portuguese sixteenth and seven- teenth century tarsia, and evidently the chefs - 1 oeuvre of patient Hindu hands, are sometimes to be found by the insidious virtuoso, but otherwise there is not a trace of such articles, so far as I am aware, in India, except what has come during the last no or 120 years from Persia.
Thus I wrote in the Handbook to the Indian Court, at the Paris Exhibition of 1878, but it is certain that inlaying in mother of pearl was at one time practised in great perfection at Ahmedabad, although the process is now almost extinct. I never saw any sample of it, but it was apparently identical with tarsia work. It is to be found on the wooden canopies over the shrines of Shah Alam at Sarkhej, and on stone in the marble tomb of one of the Sultan Ahmad’s queens. “The simpler designs,” writes Mr. E. S. P. Lely, in vol. iv. cf the Bombay Gazetteer, 1879,
