What do kundan, meenakari, thewa and polki mean?
They are four techniques, not four styles. Kundan is a cold-setting method using purified gold foil. Meenakari is coloured glass enamel fired into recesses cut in gold. Polki is natural diamond used uncut, over a reflective foil. Thewa fuses pierced gold sheet to coloured glass, and is made only in Pratapgarh. A single Rajasthani ornament frequently uses three of the four.
Every one of these words is sold as an adjective and made as a verb. The confusion is commercial rather than scholarly: "kundan jewellery" as a shop category describes a look, while kundan in a workshop describes something a specific person does at a specific moment in the making of a piece. The objects in the jewellery gallery are catalogued the second way.
Kundan
Gold, refined until it is almost chemically pure, becomes soft enough to weld to itself under pressure at room temperature. That single property is the whole technique. The setter cuts strips of this gold, packs them into the gap between a stone and its collet, and burnishes them with a steel point until the metal flows and grips.
Why go to that trouble instead of soldering? Because of the order of operations. Enamel is fired at several hundred degrees; stones are not all heat-stable, and a finished enamelled surface will not survive a torch. Kundan lets the stones go in last, cold, into a piece that is already complete. It is the technique that makes jadau possible.
Meenakari
Recesses are cut into the gold, filled with ground coloured glass, and fired. Each colour has its own melting range, so the sequence is dictated by physics: the most heat-tolerant colours are laid and fired first, the most fugitive last, because every later firing repeats the earlier heat. A five-colour piece has been through the kiln five times, and each firing risks everything already in it.
Jaipur's reputation rests on gold meenakari and on one colour in particular — a deep transparent red that is difficult to hold. Look at the back of a good Rajasthani ornament: the enamel is usually there, and it is usually better than the front, because it was made to be seen by the wearer alone.
Polki
A polki is a natural diamond that has been cleaved along its planes and polished, but not faceted into a calculated geometry. It keeps something close to its crystal shape, and it is set over a foil that throws light back through it. The result is not brilliance — the flash a modern cut is engineered to produce — but a broad, slow lustre across a flat surface.
This is why polki and brilliant-cut diamonds look wrong together, and why polki pieces are usually set closed rather than in claws: the foil has to stay dry and in place, and an open back would defeat it.
Thewa
The outlier. Thewa is made in Pratapgarh in southern Rajasthan by a small number of families, and has a geographical indication. A sheet of gold — under a tenth of a millimetre thick — is pierced with a scene, a hunt or a court or a procession, and then fused onto coloured glass, usually a deep green or blue. The gold reads as drawing; the glass reads as sky.
It is often mounted as jewellery but behaves like a picture, and thewa panels turn up in boxes, plaques and mirror frames as often as in pendants. The comparable objects here are in decorative arts.
Telling them apart in a case
- Look at the back first. Enamel on the reverse means meenakari, and probably jadau.
- Look at the edge of a stone. A rim of bright yellow gold pressed against the stone is kundan.
- Look at the stone's surface. Broad flat planes and a soft glow: polki. Small triangular facets and a hard sparkle: a modern cut.
- Look for glass. Gold drawing on a coloured translucent ground, with no stones at all: thewa.