Why were hookah mouthpieces made of silver and gemstones?
Because the mouthpiece — the mukhnal — was the only part of the apparatus that touched a person, and the only part an individual owned and carried. A guest fitted his own to his host's pipe. That made it a personal object shown in company, which is the exact condition under which luxury objects are made: portable, visible, and closely looked at.
Consider the parts of a hookah. The base holds water and stands on the floor. The stem is fixed. The bowl takes charcoal and gets dirty. The flexible pipe is long and, in the seventeenth century, made of leather and silk over a coiled core, so it wore out. And at the end of it is a short tube, no longer than a finger, which a person put in his mouth.
Everything that is true about luxury follows from that last sentence. The mukhnal was small enough to carry, personal enough that sharing one was a question of hygiene and of rank, and held at eye level in a room full of people who were also holding theirs. So it was made in silver and gold, enamelled, carved from jade or rock crystal, and set with rubies and emeralds — and it was made by the same workshops that made jewellery, because it is jewellery, worn by the hand rather than the neck.
An object that outlived its apparatus
Very few complete Mughal or Rajput hookahs survive. Water bases, in bidri or glass or silver, survive in reasonable numbers. Pipes almost never do. But mouthpieces survive constantly, because they were precious, because they were detachable, and because when the fashion for the hookah faded, a mukhnal was still a piece of worked silver that nobody melted down in a hurry.
The result is a collecting category that exists almost by accident: a class of object which was designed to be separated from its function, and which therefore comes down to us separated from it. The silverware gallery holds one of the largest groups of them anywhere, shown over water — which is where the rest of the apparatus was.
What to look at
- The taper. A mouthpiece has to be comfortable and to seal against the pipe. Every one is a compromise between those two, and the profile is the maker's signature.
- The wear. Silver goes soft and bright where a thumb rested. On a well-used piece you can see which hand held it.
- The joint. Where the mukhnal met the pipe there is usually a collar, frequently the most heavily worked part, because it was the part seen against the darker material of the hose.
- The enamel on the inside curve. Decoration in a place only the owner would ever see is the surest evidence that this was a personal object rather than a display one.
Why this collection began here
Gyan Chand Dhaddha was given two silver hookah mouthpieces when he was sixteen. He kept them, and he went on looking, for five decades. The two became a group of some 250, and around them accumulated everything else — the jewellery, the textiles, the paintings, the coins. A collection of 2,500 objects has its origin in the smallest and most personal component of a piece of furniture.
The smaller worn objects that keep it company are in accessories.