Chettiar Marriage Necklace

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Mesmerised by the prizes, I quickly signed up to become a yesterday.sg blogger to join in the fun! I was flipping through pages of artefacts when the Chettiar Marriage Necklace was caught by my own pair of eyes. I didn’t know about the contest at first, but my sister introduced me to the contest.

While western jewelry constructions of such robust size would usually be hollow, lac is the eccentric heart of a gold tali around a lac core set with rubies (Tamil Nadu; 19th century), an imposingly muscular marriage necklace with the impenetrable air of an armadillo.

The necklace was also known as kalata uru, and actually karata means neck and uru means beads. The gold marriage necklace was tied around the neck of a Chettiar bride by her new husband during her wedding. It is sometime reused during a celebration when the husband reached the age of sixty.

The central pendant depicts Shiva with his consort Parvati riding on his bull vehicle Nandi, flanked by dancers. The elements with long projections are thought to represent the hands of the couple. :India (Tamil Nadu, Chettiar)
The necklace was actually a gift from Cynthia Hazen Polsky.

Arguably one of the collection’s most wondrous pieces, gracefully straddling the line between quirky adornment and solemn grandeur, is a gold Chettiar tali (Tamil Nadu; 19th Century) with four life-sized, hand pendants (abstractions of the bride and groom’s appendages) jutting from radiant granulated beads. Usually a study in design symmetry.

The four distinctive pendants shaped of hands are called athanams.