Wear your Mughal miniatures

A jewellery line’s miniature painting-inspired collection is a collaboration with artisans who trace their lineage back to royal courts for its pieces

Lai, which creates contemporary jewellery through design-led collaborations with Indian artisans is known for pieces that combine traditional craftsmanship with a modern character. Among their most creative collections is one launched late last year called The Miniaturist and inspired by Indian miniature paintings. “My love affair with miniature painting as an art form goes back a decade-and -a-half,” says Lai founder and designer Puja Bhargava Kamath who has bought such paintings for her home and collected books on the subject, and decided ultimately to translate them into a jewellery collection.

Puja Bhargava Kamath

Finding the right artisans to do the work took time says the NIFT graduate, who divides her time between the USA and India. The miniature painters who work on larger canvases prefer that scale and the figurative work it involves, as they love the detailing necessary to render a forest or a palace, she explains. This kind of painter then is not the one who does miniature paintings for jewellery, which requires deftness and restraint given the contained nature of the small-scale work.

She chose motifs that aligned with the history of miniature painting, and so wanted the artwork to either be Mughal-inspired or contain Rajput and Hindu iconography. As a result, she collaborated with two chitrakars in Ajmer and Jaipur to build the collection, both of whom learned their art from their forefathers, who were artists in royal courts.

Once the paintings were ready, they were sent to Lai’s silver artisans in Jaipur. The artisans, she says, often use organic colours made at home occasionally supplementing them with commercially available ones to help them sustain for longer, while preferring to make their own brushes. The collection’s most popular pieces, she says, have been their asymmetrical tantric earrings, their long tota earrings, the asymmetrical Mughal floral poppy earrings, a koel statement ring and a pair of drop-shape Mughal-inspired lily earrings.

Lai’s pieces are typically made to order, says Kamath. “That helps us produce just about enough and know which are the popular designs and have a little extra stock of those. It helps a bootstrap business like ours to best utilise our resources.”

WHAT: The Miniaturist, Lai
WHERE: https://in.lai-designs.com/collections/the-miniaturist
FOR: Rs 2,250 upwards

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