Design & creation
Jewellery making is hundred percent a human process.
Those are the workshop’s own words about its own trade, and everything on this page is an argument for why they are literally true rather than a slogan.
Six stages
Before any of it, somebody has to decide what the piece is.
- 1
It starts in the mind
A design is imagined before it is drawn. Everything downstream is the business of getting that idea out intact.
- 2
A blueprint on paper
The design is drawn — proportion, weight, where the stones sit, how it will hang and move on a body rather than on a page.
- 3
Parts, not a block
Indian work is assembled: flowers, small balls, leaves, wire, each made and then joined. A piece is a construction, not a carving.
- 4
Melting and forming
Gold or silver is melted and worked into those parts — the point at which the drawing stops being a drawing.
- 5
Joining
The parts are assembled and soldered into the piece the blueprint described.
- 6
Polishing, and then colour
The surface is brought up, and only then does the piece go for plating — because plating shows whatever is underneath it.
The part people miss
A piece is built, not carved
Look closely at traditional Indian work and it resolves into components: flowers, small balls, leaves, drawn wire, cups and settings. Each is made separately — struck, drawn, formed, turned — and then joined.
That is why the same design can be made at three different qualities. The parts can be crisper or softer, the joins cleaner or heavier, the wire more evenly drawn. None of that is visible in a photograph and all of it is visible in the hand.
It is also why the trade is organised the way it is. A karigar who makes exceptional flowers does that; the piece is assembled from the work of several pairs of hands, and somebody has to be responsible for the whole thing hanging correctly at the end.
The components
- Flowers
- Small balls
- Leaves
- Drawn wire
- Cups and settings
- Joins and solder
From the workshop's own account of its process.
Two ways of getting there, both in use
Neither is the modern one replacing the old one. They answer different questions.
Traditional
Drawn, then built at the bench
The traditional way is the one above: drawn by hand, built at the bench by a karigar, one piece at a time. It is unmatched for a single commissioned piece and for work whose value is in its irregularity.
Best for: one commissioned piece, heirloom work, anything whose value is in being unrepeatable.
Modern
Modelled, grown, cast
The modern way models the piece in CAD, grows a master by machine, and takes it through casting — which is how a design becomes four hundred pieces that are all the same. Both are in daily use in this workshop, and the right one depends entirely on what is being made and how many.
Best for: a collection, a repeat order, anything where every piece must match every other.
Watch it happen
Making of Jewellery
Seven minutes on the floor: melting, the assembling of flowers, balls, leaves and wire into a piece, and the polishing that ends it.
Presented by Naru Rhodium & Naru Casting. Seven minutes, and the shortest way to understand why the sentence at the top of this page is not marketing.
Have a design in mind?
Bring the drawing, the reference photograph or the piece you want it to look like. We will tell you which route makes it — bench or cast — and what each would cost you.
Kanchwala Building, 3rd Floor, Room No. 28, 63 Dhanji Street, Zaveri Bazar, Mumbai 400003