New Delhi
Having made so many helmets, armour, and military costumes for Hollywood movies, Ashok Rai was thrilled when military costume designer David Crossman invited him to visit the set of Kingdom of Heaven in Morocco. Crossman had placed a big order for 12th-century battlegear for the film.
This was Rai's chance to see his beautifully crafted artefacts being used by famous actors - but he had to cancel his ticket. 'Their order was so huge that I had to stay back to supervise it,' he says.
The order book at his factory in Sahibabad, outside the Indian capital, is always full despite its ad hoc origins 15 years ago. Rai started his business - supplying historically accurate battlegear for war movies and historical re-enactments - as a one-off order.
He had heard, when he was 17, that a French champagne maker needed 1,000 swords to give away as souvenirs. He went hunting for sword-makers, found them and fulfilled the order. 'I thought that was it. But my mother gave me 20,000 rupees to buy a computer. I surfed the net and found there was actually a big demand for these objects and started manufacturing a whole variety of them,' he says.
Rai, now 31, specialises in battle attire and weapons stretching from the 10th century to the second world war, although he also makes items from ancient Rome and Greece.
He has supplied for Tom Cruise's late 19th-century Japan-set The Last Samurai (2003), and made footwear for Russell Crowe's Robin Hood (2010), as well as supplying all sorts of props for historical movies and documentaries covering periods such as the Napoleonic era and the American Revolution. That's not to mention the chain mail armour - lots of it - he made for Orlando Bloom's Kingdom of Heaven (2005).
At Rai's workshop - a deafening din of drilling, sawing, grinding and hammering - everything is hand-made and carefully researched by Rai's staff who visit the armouries of European museums to get the details right.
'Each chain mail armour ring takes two minutes to rivet the links and there are 33,000 rings in a chain mail - so that works out to 66,000 minutes to make one,' he says. 'And for Kingdom of Heaven, we had to make 1,500 chain mail suits.'
These days, much of his merchandise is not sold directly to Hollywood studios, but to Spanish and American companies which rent it out whenever a filmmaker requires it.
A history buff, Rai likes to research the details so that he cannot be faulted on accuracy. Ask him about German Werhmacht helmets and he is off, churning out details about the 'M' series helmet which was designed for the first world war and fine-tuned into the M-42 paratrooper helmet used by German soldiers in the second world war.
'This was later copied by the Americans and it's basically the same design as is used by US Marines today, though made of fibreglass instead of metal,' says Rai.
