Behind the silver line.

Lacking the jewels and intricate workmanship Indian jewellery is known for, peasant jewellery from India embodies tradition made new. Farzana Syed looks at the meanings in the ROM's Indian silver.

The drawerful of silver jewellery from India was dirty and worn, and exuded a distinctive earthy smell. It was unlike the expensive jewellery India is known for--with its gold, precious gems, and highly detailed work--which is made only for the upper classes to display their wealth, grandeur, and high status. The pieces before me lacked jewels or intricate workmanship. Clearly this was peasant jewellery, with very different personal uses and symbolism. Despite its simplicity, the jewellery fascinated me. I ignored the impulse to try on a piece or two and began to explore its history.

I was working as a curatorial intern at the ROM, and this jewellery, from the Charles Danzker Collection recently donated to the Museum, was my first large research project. It proved to be an intriguing historical puzzle. Usually, silver pieces are labelled "traditional" or "tribal."

While the term "tribal" may not sound out of place given the jewellery's modest origins, I wondered exactly what it is that makes the silver pieces "traditional." The Danzker Collection gave me a great opportunity to explore this question and the meaning of the label-and to understand how notions of tradition ultimately helped fuel the British colonization of India.

Some pieces from the collection were instantly recognizable--anklets, bracelets, and earrings--while others--such as two heavy, oddly shaped pieces of metal and something resembling a chatelaine--left me guessing as to their origins and uses. The quality of the pieces varied. Some had delicate punching and stamping while the shapes and designs of others indicated a more rudimentary origin.

What I found from my research is that typically, the words traditional and tribal both refer to simpler jewellery made from silver and beads. This jewellery is associated with the notions of tradition that village and tribal community life are considered to embody--untouched by modern influence, simple in their ways, reflecting an unchanging cultural character at the core of the Indian national identity. By extension, traditional jewellery is thought to reflect a continuity in design, motifs, workmanship, and production that has lasted for centuries, if not millennia.

Certainly, tradition lies in the religious imagery that ties the present pieces of jewellery to a distant past in which the gods and goddesses celebrated were the same as they are now. The first thing that caught my eye in the Danzker Collection was the number of bracelets and anklets with makara heads at the ends. The makara, a mythical water beast combining the features of a crocodile, an elephant, and a fish, relates to the fertility of water life, representing many things-the vehicle that the goddess Ganga rides upon, the Ganga River personified, and Varuna, the god of terrestrial waters. The use of two makara heads, symbols found throughout India and worn by men and women of all classes, is a popular representation of protection and the life force.

While the tradition of religious imagery is widespread, other traditions can be specific to a region and caste or associated with the ancestors who passed down the jewellery-making knowledge in a community. A pair of earrings worn by Vaishnavite women in the Nagarkoil district of Tamil Nadu in south India, for example--the heavy pieces of metal I couldn't at first identify--is a distinctive marker of community. The three-dimensional geometric shape that characterizes these oddly shaped earrings suggests a yantra--an object that symbolizes the divine. In a different area of south India, an anklet worn specifically by Sudra women uses regional vegetation--the velengkay bean--as a fertility symbol. Raised surfaces on the anklet pieces represent the swelling of the seed within the velangkay pod.

Jewellery pieces usually represent the divine or other positive symbols, but amulets are considered to be more powerful, and, when blessed, to be able to repel or attract energy for the wearer. Most often, they take the form of pendants, charms, or cords. Of the repelling amulets, the most common were worn to ward off disease, sickness, or the evil eye--the inadvertent bad wishes of a jealous person. Another kind of repelling amulet, the cache-sexe plate, was tied around a young girl's waist to cover her genitals; this guarded her modesty but also repelled evil spirits from entering a body orifice that would otherwise be exposed. The ROM has a silver example from Andhra Pradesh. These ornaments are characteristically in the yoni shape--the shape of a woman's vulva and believed to represent the female divine in Hinduism--and often bear symbols of fertility and the life force, such as the sun, the moon, or flowers. In Rajasthan, to prevent the spirits of dead ancestors from troubling their living relatives, the Goraknaths wear a pendant decorated with two snakes to represent the ancestors, a rising cobra with its hood open to indicate protection, and sun, moon, and flower symbols to represent the living.

Attracting amulets were most often used to promote fertility and to preserve health and material possessions. One type common across India is a woman's armband with an amulet box. Sealed inside is a blessed object or prayer meant to attract good luck to the wearer. Another type of attracting amulet, though none was found in the Danzker Collection, is the astrological gemstone--the stone's properties are thought to help channel positive energy to the wearer based on astrological profile.

Many other types of jewellery were merely ornamental, but some served practical purposes. Toiletry kits--which are common across South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia--are one example. Whether decoratively ornate or simple, these amalgams of personal hygiene tools were worn on the waist or around the neck. The Danzker Collection includes a woman's ornamental toiletry kit from south India. Designed to dangle from the waist, it consists of a blade for cutting small items, a toothpick, an ear pick, tweezers, and a small box to hold kohl for the eyes. The first time I saw it I immediately associated the piece with the decorative chatelaine key holders that were once common in Europe and throughout India. The difference is that while chatelaines were worn mainly by wealthy upper-class women to denote their class status, as well as their station as head of the household, toiletry kits were used by men and women of all ages and backgrounds. While tradition is evident in these examples, the idea of tradition is far from being an Indian notion. It is largely a construct of British colonialism, codified during the British period in India. Indians themselves did organize traditions, but they did so to create a national identity in reaction to colonialism. The British first used ideas of tradition to understand Indian practices and concepts that were foreign to them, but in the end they used their perceptions of tradition to justify colonial rule.

Thomas Holbein Hendley's extensive compilation of Indian jewellery called Indian Jewellery: The Journal of Indian Art & Industry, published at the beginning of the 20th century, is a good example of the British misperception of tradition in India. In his documentation of Indian jewellery from antiquity to what was then the present day he shows contemporary jewellery juxtaposed with images of antiquated temple sculptures. In line with other Western anthropological reports of the time on various subjects, Hendley considered the contemporary jewellery equivalent to the temple sculptures from thousands of years before, implying that, like ancient statues, the jewellery was unchanged through time. Rather than any real account of the jewellery, Hendley's idea of a static tradition more accurately reflects the perceptions of the West that were imposed on Indian culture. This idea of an unchanging tradition was one of the things that prompted the British to take up their self-appointed role of bringing change to India and "civilizing" the people. Photographs taken by the British during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as two in the ROM's collection, reflect the same desire to capture the traditional--which intentionally or unintentionally shaped the West's view of India.

In the common lexicon, people seem to use the terms "traditional" and "tribal" interchangeably when describing Indian silver jewellery, although the words would never be considered synonymous outside that context. "Tradition," as promoted by Indian nationalists, is usually associated with peasant and rural communities, symbols of the idyllic village life that is at the heart of the Indian identity. For them, tribal communities fell outside that sphere, reflecting separate and more primitive societies that need not be mentioned. They were thought to be a "glimpse of the past"--reflecting an authentic primitive state. So while a village girl would often symbolize the "traditional Indian woman," a tribal girl was outside the mainstream of Indian identity.

The distinction between the "tribal-traditional" attitude of the British--a reflection of the beliefs that were projected onto their Indian colonial subjects as primitive and uncivilized--and the "peasant-traditional" attitude of Indian nationalists--reflecting the idyllic state they wanted to portray--gives insight into understanding how both sides used their perceptions of tradition politically.

Thanks to ideas passed on from the early anthropological literature on India, tribal life is commonly assumed to be isolated with little contact with outside groups; jewellery worn by such tribal folk is therefore assumed to be made within their communities. The rudimentary designs and shapes and elementary work with beads or silver are attributed to the simple means available to these isolated people. While this is true for some tribes, it is not uncommon for tribal communities to have their jewellery made outside the community, or to barter for pieces from villages and cities. The Toda aborigines from the Nilgiri Hills region in Tamil Nadu, for example, have their jewellery made by the Asaris of the Malabar Coast, peasants of the artisan or carpenter class. A beautiful Toda aboriginal piece from the Danzker Collection--a hollow bracelet stamped with concentric geometric designs and filled with small stone pellets to create a rhythmic sound--is an extremely rare find from a vanishing community, the work of a skilled jewellery maker. But it must be distinguished as a piece worn by the Todas, but not made by them. The shape and design of the bracelet as well as the stamped patterning indicate that the piece was created within the last two centuries, since stamping is a relatively new technique.

Many "tribal" pieces found in one community reveal similarities to those in many other parts of the country. A pair of anklets in the Danzker Collection, for example, is attributed to tribal women in south India, but the cut beads are identical to ones made in the north. To correct the misconception that these communities remain unchanged, it is important to recognize such outside influences. And by extension, we must change our notion of "tradition." After all, very few pieces of so-called traditional Indian silver jewellery date before the 19th century. Until that time, it was common practice to melt down and re-forge metal ornaments to make newer pieces. So our knowledge of what is traditional doesn't go beyond 200 years. And much of it comes only from the present generation and their use of techniques that have been passed down.

I don't question that Indian tradition embodies age-old religious symbolism and inherited regional specificity. But I do question just how static these traditions are. The 19th century brought many changes to India through import and export and the increased influence of British colonialism. While international trade sent Indian influences to the outside world, trade influences from other parts of the world likewise affected the design and production of Indian materials, particularly jewellery. Newer techniques such as etching, punching, and stamping were introduced, effectively sidelining the use of chiselling and other older methods for patterning sheet metal. Newer ways of creating alloys of silver and copper resulted in harder or softer metals, whichever was more desirable in designing the piece in question. With few pre-19th-century pieces available for comparison, we can't really know if current jewellery reflects ancient traditions.

In Western society, the "tradition" of the diamond engagement ring, thought by many today to be a time-honoured symbol of betrothal, offers an interesting parallel. While evidence of engagement rings goes as far back as the ancient Greeks, it was not until a 1939 advertising campaign by DeBeer's that the diamond became the only choice for an engagement ring. Just as no doubt happened with Indian jewellery, an innovation was added to inherited habits to create a new "tradition."

The concept of change within continuity has interesting implications for Indian identity. On one hand, tradition and the idea of unchanging norms are crucial in affirming a historical identity to which the diverse regional groups in India can relate. On the other hand, acknowledging change and improvement is vital to the perception that India is a modern and progressing nation.

Reconciling these two ideas proves the most interesting part of understanding the larger framework in which this jewellery was made. While the pieces in the Royal Ontario Museum's Danzker Collection may be simple, they are also complex in that they are new while also embodying tradition. Remnants of the past, they have quietly been updated in the shadows of an inherited knowledge.