In the 1950s, Delhi-based designer Anjali Gupta’s grandfather returned from Bombay with the vision of a home unlike any in his village in Chhapra, Bihar: circular, barfi-shaped, and rectangular windows framed its façade, while red oxide floors grounded it. This house became the nucleus of her family, a place where women held together both kinship and memory. It is this house and its memory that anchor Gupta’s first collection. “That house wasn’t just walls,” she says. “It was the centre of our family.”
Gupta’s work begins where many of our earliest aesthetic experiences do — in the tijori, the family safe, where jewels gleam like treasures from fairy tales. She remembers watching her grandmother, mother, and aunts open the box, and the thrill of seeing the same pieces again and again, never exhausted by repetition. “I’d wait with excitement just to see the pieces, and no matter how many times I looked at them, it was never enough,” she says.
This act, at once ordinary and ceremonial, is perhaps the purest form of jewellery appreciation: unmediated, familial, intimate. In Gupta’s designs, her grandmother’s quotidian elegance — her pierced tooth, the ruby-like red stone on her ring, filigree bangles worn everyday without change — becomes a template for the kind of everyday adornment that resists excess.
“The women in my family owned only a handful of jewels, mostly in silver and gold with hints of meenakari, yet every piece was treasured.”Anjali Gupta
In translating these memories into design, Gupta sidesteps the maximalist aesthetic language of contemporary Indian jewellery design. Her collection carries the textures of lived experience rather than the polish of artisanal spectacle. “Living in Delhi for so long, I began to feel distant from my roots in Bihar. I was forgetting certain foods, vegetables, even parts of my language,” she says. Her designs articulate these dichotomies: forgetting and remembering; rootedness and departure; nostalgia and renewal.
Gupta recognises the women in her family as co-creators of the collection. “These women shaped my world and, unknowingly, shaped this collection,” she says. “My grandmother, with her mango business and vegetable gardens, taught me resilience. My aunts crafting artificial jewellery showed me creativity born out of necessity. This collection is me honouring my memory of them, their lives and their dreams.” By making their influence explicit, Gupta challenges the notion of the solitary designer-genius and situates her work within a matrilineal continuum.
“Creating this collection helped me reconnect. It made me realise how deeply Bihari I am.”Anjali Gupta
Seen through this cultural lens, Gupta’s jewellery resists the global homogenisation of adornment. Her designs do not aspire to fit within the extremes of minimalism or opulence. Instead, she speaks a vernacular language — local, specific, and rooted in Bihar’s cultural landscape — while still addressing universal themes of memory, inheritance, and identity. In doing so, she affirms jewellery as a cultural practice: one that carries the memory of home, the imprint of matriarchs, and the bittersweet recognition of distance and return.
Follow Anjali Gupta (@begumsitaara) here.
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