Rajasthan is a place full of colourful shades as it has the golden Jaisalmer, Udaipur‘s white lakes, Jodhpur’s blue houses and the Pink City. The glorious forts, palaces and forests make it more magnificent and majestic.
The bright aged old culture, tradition and ethnicity can be eye witnessed during festivals and carnivals. During celebrations, people wear their traditional attires and jewelleries and enjoy dancing on folk music.
In Rajasthan, jewellery plays a key role in the enrichment of heritage; it is well renowned all over the world for its majestic, vibrant and allegorical jewellery. Every piece of jewellery has its different religious meaning and believed to be sacred. Sometimes the jewellery designs and other times, the material used in jewellery creates huge diversity resulting in the origin of new variants of Rajasthan folk jewellery.
Jewellery has its own place in the traditional attire of Rajasthan as wearing jewellery is considered to be part of the culture which makes them unique, outstanding and colourful.
One of the most popular bright-coloured jewellery of Rajasthan is Kundan-Meena jewellery. Kundan is usually made from lac, which is a natural resin. This jewellery has work of gems and Meenakari on both the sidesthus making exquisite patterns with exciting colours.
Generally red and green coloured stones are glued on pure gold to elaborate beauty which gives a royal look to the women. But even other jewellery such as filigree, silver, lac, ivory, gold and thewa are also prominent among the people of Rajasthan.
Rajasthan is the primary centre of jewellery production and also exports 15% of Indian jewellery. Women in this state adorn almost every part of their body with different ornaments.
They decorate their waist with kardhani which is also known as kandora or Mekhala and Kanakti. These ornaments cover the waist from all sides. On legs, they wear their stuffs like paijeb, payal, kada&langar, anguda&bichuae, awlanevta, jhanzar & noopur and pungpan which are usually made of silver. Their neck pieces consist of mukthmala, manikmala and tabeez.
The jhumkas are the most prominent ear ornaments which are bell-shaped, made usually in gold or silver. These jhumkas have void hemispheres with bells of similar length attached in the form of concentric circles. The inner circles have the smallest but longer bells then outer circles. A woman of Rajasthan is always covered from head to toe in jewels. Women belonging to Rajput and Mahajan families wear jhumkas weighing up to fifty grams or more. Along with them, the other popular ornamants are Surliya, Long and Sankali.
In nose they wear jewellery like nathali, long and kanta. They also wear jewellery in arms termed asbajubandh, batta or baju, while they adore their hands with bagdi, poonji, gold bangles and chuda. In palms, they have hathphool which is nothing but a ring attached to bangle via chains lying at the back of the hand. They embellish their head with lakdi, baser, borla, tika and tildi. They use anklets called kanduji, jodh, takane, jhanzaria, tule and panjaniya while on toes they wear bichuvae and chitki.
Not only this, but they also get attires that have real gold and silver embroidery. The woman is jewelled in traditional clothes which is the trade mark of the states like Rajasthan.
