Tarakasi & Meenakari: Filigree & Enamel Traditions

Silver Wire in Cuttack, Enamel on Gold in Jaipur, and the Families Who Still Know the Ruby Red

Meet the Sunari silver filigree families of Cuttack's Nayasarak lane, who still build ten-kilogram chandi medhas for Durga Puja by hand, and the Johari Bazaar meenakars of Jaipur, whose ruby-red enamel recipe arrived with Raja Man Singh in 1590 and has survived four centuries of court patronage, colonial collapse and contemporary revival. Learn how two Persian crafts became unmistakably Indian, and meet the masters and brands keeping them alive today.

A Winter Morning in Cuttack

A winter morning in Cuttack, December 2012. In a narrow lane called Nayasarak, a senior tarakasi craftsman sits in front of a charcoal brazier, pulling silver wire through a steel draw plate. Call him Bhagirathi Rana, a composite figure drawn from the working lives of Nayasarak's silver lane. The wire starts as thick as a matchstick. By the last hole, it is thinner than a human hair. The room smells of borax and burnt charcoal. In eight weeks, the Sahid Nagar Puja Mandap will need a chandi medha, a full silver filigree backdrop for the goddess, ten kilograms of wire work assembled entirely by hand. Bhagirathi has built one every winter for thirty-seven years. But only four of his workers are under thirty. Will the medha after this one ever get made?

Cuttack's silver filigree has a name of its own. Tarakasi is Odia for 'wire work', and the craft has been running in these few lanes for at least seven hundred years. It is one of two extraordinary Indian metal traditions this lesson is about. The other sits fifteen hundred kilometres to the west, inside the walled city of Jaipur, and it is called Meenakari, the art of enamel on gold.

Both are Indian. Both are Persian in origin. Both arrived here through long journeys and royal decisions. And both are now held alive by a small number of families you could count on two hands.

What tarakasi actually is

Tarakasi is the art of making a flat or three-dimensional picture entirely out of drawn silver wire. The craftsman does not carve the silver. He pulls it. He starts with a thick silver rod and draws it, again and again, through a steel plate with graded holes. Each pull makes the wire thinner. A good Cuttack tarakasi wire can be pulled down to 0.2 millimetres, roughly the thickness of two sheets of paper.