Two hundred kilometres east of Delhi sits a city that has smelled of hot metal for four centuries. Moradabad is known across India as Pital Nagari, the Brass City, and almost every family here is bound to the trade in one way or another. Someone melts, someone casts, someone hammers, someone etches the fine floral borders by hand.
What arrives in your kitchen as a masala dabba began as scrap brass in a furnace, poured, beaten into shape, and finished with a chisel held the same way it was held by the maker's father. The small irregularities in the etching are not defects. They are the signature of a hand that has done this ten thousand times.
Brass rewards use. It develops a warm patina, it keeps spices dry, and it outlasts almost everything else in the kitchen. Buy one piece and you understand why these objects get passed down rather than thrown away.