JAWAHARAT !!

Indians are known for their expertise in creating innumerable forms of jewellery, which have fascinated the world. Kundan is one of the oldest forms of jewellery made and worn in India and continues to be in vogue. Thanks to its patronage by the royalty during the Mughal era, it flourished and gradually became the jewellery of the masses when it was successfully mastered in Rajasthan, Varanasi and Chennai.

Kundan Minakari style of jewellery presents a unique blend of two distinct genres of jewellery crafting. Interestingly, both these styles are standalone techniques of jewellery making, offering infinite possibilities of manifesting the craftsperson’s’ imagination to create something that is magnificently beautiful.

India’s love affair with jewelry is without parallel in the world, an unbroken tradition of personal adornment spanning five thousand years. From simple floral garlands to the coruscating brilliance of creations in pure gold laden with gems, India has spawned a prodigious range of jewels, each replete with symbols and meanings appropriate to the status and style.

Kundan is the technique of encrusting a gold structure with gemstones of varied shapes and sizes using ribbons made of pure gold; the stones are set on the face of jewelry. On the other hand, Minakari or Enameling, is a method of embellishing metal surface with colored motifs, patterns and visual narratives with the use of metallic oxides and is usually applied on the back of a jewelry piece. While both these techniques have been independently used for many centuries, their complementing unification, known to have been developed during the Mughal Period, was the start of a whole new paradigm in jewelry crafting.
The Kundan technique primarily engages with the structural element of jewelry and is concerned with the setting of gemstones in a closed-back gold frame. The Hindi term Kundan means “pure gold”. In Kundan setting, gold in its hyper purified form sans any alloy is used; this kind of gold has the unique ability to get fused in cold state simply with the use of pressure without employing any heat at all.

Enamelling, on the other hand, deals with ornately enhancing the gold substrate and is the prime mode of rendering it with colours and patterns. In generic terms, enamelling is the technique of fusing glass onto a metal surface using the process of firing. Once the enamel is fused on the metal it becomes durable and impermeable, and acquires depth while retaining its brilliance, since its vitreous components preserve its ability to absorb and reflect light.

Enameling, on the other hand, deals with ornately enhancing the gold substrate and is the prime mode of rendering it with colors and patterns. In generic terms, enameling is the technique of fusing glass onto a metal surface using the process of firing. Once the enamel is fused on the metal it becomes durable and impermeable, and acquires depth while retaining its brilliance, since its vitreous components preserve its ability to absorb and reflect light.
The realm of jewelry has been stupendously inspired by the geometric forms. Kundan style jewelry along with enameling borrows the design language of its gold structures from basic geometric shapes.

The much celebrated style of Kundan Minakari is a distinct genre of jewellery crafting, using the twin techniques of Kundan (stone setting) and Minakari (embellishing the gold surface with coloured enamels) on the obverse and reverse of a singular ornament, which has created a whole new idiom in the realm of precious jewellery in India. Possibly no Indian wedding today is complete without Kundan Minakari Jewellery.

Each step has its own plethora of creative and technical demands which the specialist karigar with years of accumulated erudition and experience is able to proficiently use. What thus comes alive is simply a delectable object of adornment endowed with an enduring impact.