Mangalore Tile Industry

One of the first building materials dating back to the pre-Christian era was brick made of mud and dried in the sun.
Bricks fired in kilns then came into use - the Great Wall of China, for instance was built with both sun dried and fired bricks.

A tile is essentially a piece of clay, which has been shaped and fired and is used for paving floors, covering roofs or decorating walls.

Terra cotta or 'baked earth' includes a variety of coarse and porous clays which when fired and left unglazed, attain a hue ranging from ochre and buff to deep pink and red.

Terra cotta, which in India dates back to the Indus Valley Civilization, is cheap, versatile and durable and is still popularly used in Asia for building bricks and roof tiles.

The Basel Mission in India and particularly in the states of south Karnataka and Kerala, formed a joint stock company in the 1850s under the name Mission-Handels-Gesellschaft (Mission Trading Company) to raise the capital necessary for establishing new industries.

A major industry set up soon thereafter was a tile-manufacturing factory.

The Missionaries anticipated a high demand for quality roof tiles since the region had heavy monsoon rains.

The hard red clayey soil in the region, too, was suitable for the manufacture of tiles and a factory to manufacture flat tiles was started in 1865.

One of the earliest clients was the Cantonment Orphanage or Cathedral High School on Richmond Road in Bangalore, which used the tiles for the school roof.

In 1877 a second factory was opened and a third in 1880 and by 1903 the three tile works of the Basel Mission in Mangalore employed 540 people and the three at Feroke, Malabar 650 people.

In 1913, the tile factories were producing 60,000 tiles a day and employing 2,000 workers - both men and women.