Mohd Sultan’s family has been making sharpeners since the ‘50s

In the narrow alleys of Turkman Gate lives a family that’s been making sharpeners for over 50 years. “We were the first people to make plastic sharpeners in India during the early ’50s. Before that all sharpeners were imported from Germany,” says Mohammed Sultan, 58, pointing to a 1965 photograph that shows his father making sharpeners in a factory.

In 1956, his father, Jalil Ur Rehman, started making sharpeners. “My father worked in Lal Quan where he sharpened blades. One day a customer asked him to design a blade for a German sharpener. He experimented by cutting a thin portion of metal from a saw and pasting it on the plastic sharpener,” says Sultan, surrounded by sharpeners in all shapes at his home-cum-office in Bulbulli Khana.

With 37 hand moulding machines and a work force of three, Rehman would churn out 30,000 sharpeners every day. “By evening the stock would be cleared out from our home and sold in the markets,” says Sultan. Their big day came in 1971 when the owner of Hindustan Pencil Pvt. Limited flew down from Mumbai to meet Rehman because he was impressed by the quality and durability of his sharpeners. “The previous day one of the company’s labourers had sharpened 300 pencils with one of our sharpeners,” explains Sultan. After the meeting, Rehman bagged a two-year contract with the company for the distribution of their brand ‘Sultan Pencil Sharpeners’ across India. Now they own four different brands.

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