Choosing a payal for every day
Weight, clasp and bells: what to check before you buy an anklet you will wear daily.
What is tarakasi?
Cuttack’s filigree begins as a silver bar and ends as wire finer than a hair, bent into lace.
Tarakasi comes from two words: tar, meaning wire, and kasi, meaning design. It is the filigree work of Cuttack, practised here for at least five centuries.
The work begins with a bar of pure silver, which is drawn through a series of smaller and smaller holes in a steel plate until it becomes fine wire. Two wires are twisted together and then flattened, which gives tarakasi its distinctive beaded texture.
The karigar first bends a thicker wire into the frame of the design: a leaf, a flower, a peacock. He then fills the frame with fine twisted wire, bent with tweezers into scrolls and loops, without any drawing to follow. The filled frames are soldered together with silver powder over a small flame.
A pair of filigree earrings takes about two days. A jewellery box like the ones in our window can take three weeks. Each piece is slightly different, because no two hands bend wire in quite the same way.
