There’s nothing here you haven’t seen before and yet it feels new but in a strangely familiar kind of way — like someone you meet whom you know you don’t know but who, it somehow seems, you’ve know...

There’s nothing here you haven’t seen before and yet it feels new but in a strangely familiar kind of way — like someone you meet whom you know you don’t know but who, it somehow seems, you’ve known all along in a manner both intimate and intense.

The Naksha Kanbala, that time-honoured classic, is replicated in exactitude as the centrepiece of this simple but stunning necklace that’s lissome in its construct of the chain part but operatic in the articulation of the naksha kanbala centrepiece with all its bells and whistles and an all-important combination of seed pearls and gold orbs in the trimning that not only offers welcome relief from an only-gold jewel but helps define the pendant as well.

The pasha’s been flattened into a double ball roundel with a reverse naksha flower in the centre, fully detailed, and holding a solitary pearl in its heart.

The tipki-ball kamal chain is the obvious choice for this necklace where the kanbala must necessarily be the centre of attention, but the edging of cones — with their double ball finials and a single barfi embossed on each — introduces a tribal pulse to the ornament and makes it earthy yet sophisticated in its juxtaposition of diametrically varied workmanship that yet cohere with grace and power, both.

It’s a thrilling jewel, this –– reassigning to the familiar a dramatic urgency and making the known unknown and then known again in a vital way, as if such an ornament were an imperative, a must-have. And so perhaps it is.

Handcrafted in three different kinds of workmanship and designed to be in perfect balance through its disparate characteristics, the Kudrati Kanbala Necklace, here in gero-polish, speaks our strength and glory and beauty and earthiness in pure guinea gold and enunciates the kindness inherent to our femininity as the familiar and its primordial power as the unfamiliar, the latter manifesting itself, as it does here, whenever called upon, whenever needed, prayed for, or as we deem fit.