Necklace with Champa-Buds and Maulashri Flower Design

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This necklace, a fascinating piece of jewellery – an adjustable choker type, abounding in great magnificence, delicate, and worked with minute details, transforming conventionalized forms into strange looking objects with rare charm, comprises at least three traditional design-motifs used in Indian jewellery tradition now for centuries. These are a form of Champa- bud, the main design-motif of the necklace, a tiny multi-petalled Maulashri flower, and a four-petalled flower form also known as diamond-cut design. Champa, an evergreen indigenous Indian plant bearing a highly fragrant yellowish white flower, often confused with Jasmine in English dictionaries, known as ‘Michelia Campaca’ in botanical terminology, is being used, especially the form of its buds, by Indian jewelers pan India as one of their favourite design-motifs for a necklace in particular, though also for armlets, anklets, foot ornaments and even girdles since times immemorial.

Champa-kali-har, a necklace with Champa-bud as its main design-motif, has always been the love of all from a king to a tribal whatever its medium, precious stones or pewter and other inexpensive metals. Many early sculptures represent figures of gods and kings wearing a Champa-kali har. Like Champa, Maulashri is also an ever green annually flowering tree though unlike Champa – a shrub of a bit larger size, Maulashri is a large tree. Maulashri flower has been a favourite design-motif of jewelers, perhaps for the reason that while other objects conventionalised into mere motifs Maulashri’s button like tiny flower could be replicated in its original form. Besides its exceptional or rather maddening fragrance winning for it prime locations in medieval royal gardens it is known for the uniformity of its multi-petalled form and its formal beauty. The diamond-cut design, a conventionalised four-petalled flower-motif, has been used for designing the connecting loops that it surmounts.

A tremendously beautiful piece of jewellery, the choker has been designed with two classes of design-units, the main, numbering thirty, and subsidiary, designed for joining the main units, numbering twenty-nine, all in either class being identical as die-cast. The diamond-cut floral motif has been conceived for cresting the subsidiary unit. This subsidiary unit works dually. A loop on the reverse it serves as connector, and on the obverse, its diamond-cut flower motif – the superstructure, serves as spacers beautifully manipulating the intermediary spaces. The main design-unit consists of three miniaturised forms : base-structure consisting of three rings soldered together to look like a three-petalled flower, a Maulashri flower motif atop the obverse of the base-structure, and an arrow-head like conceived pendant on its bottom. Each of the two rings comprising the base-structure, other than the one conceived with Maulashri flower top, is used as loop to join its counterpart in adjacent unit.

The main unit’s third component – its pendant, the choker’s crowning beauty and the most dominating part, conventionalised in the course of time, is widely recognized as the Champa-kali design, though different from a plain and rather elongated Champa’s bud-form its shorter length gathered towards the stem and its highly stylized body and stem-part drag it closer to a banana-bud form. Apart, its upper part, consisting of gradually reducing circles terminating into a dot, has reflection of a conch-form. Banana bud and conch are other widely used conventional motifs in Indian jewellery. Champa has long been venerated having amuletic powers; conch, believed to dispel all evils by its sound; and, banana, the loved fruit of Lord Ganesha, effects every good by its auspices. Obvious as it appears, this form of pendant is basically the Champa-bud but highly conventionalized it also synthesizes the forms of banana-bud and conch and has hence tripled protective bearing.

This description by Prof. P.C. Jain and Dr Daljeet. Prof. Jain specializes on the aesthetics of ancient Indian literature. Dr Daljeet is the chief curator of the Visual Arts Gallery at the National Museum of India, New Delhi. They have both collaborated on numerous books on Indian art and culture.