Katesari Jewelry — The Fading Craft of Foil Glass and Silver from North India

There is a kind of light that only glass can hold. Not the hard brilliance of a cut diamond. Not the depth of a coloured gemstone. Something quieter — the soft, diffused luminosity of clear glass backed with silver or gold foil, catching and returning light the way moonlight reflects off still water. This is the particular quality that Katesari jewelry has traded in for centuries. And it is a quality that the world is in real danger of losing. Katesari is a silversmithing tradition from Uttar Pradesh, in the heart of northern India. It is old, it is precise, it is extraordinarily beautiful — and it is practiced today by only a handful of artisan families, most of whom have no successors. To hold a piece of authentic Katesari jewelry is to hold something that may not be made again.

What is Katesari jewelry?

Katesari is a form of jewelry, most commonly a choker necklace, made in silver with foil-backed glass settings. The name itself is associated with the tradition — Katesari pieces are typically composed of multiple silver units or modules, each one containing a piece of clear glass backed with reflective foil. The foil is most often silver or gold coloured, and it gives the glass a luminous quality from within, as though each setting holds a small, captured light. The classic Katesari choker is a multi-tiered piece. The upper row typically features quatrefoil or geometric silver settings, each holding a clear foil-backed glass element. The lower row is more ornate — arched silver units with pendant ghungroos (tiny bells) that move and ring with the wearer. At the centre of many traditional Katesari pieces is a tikka element: a small auspicious red dot at the heart of the central glass setting, marking the piece as ceremonial and significant. The entire construction is strung on dark red cord or thread — a detail that is distinctive to the tradition and that adds warmth and contrast to the silver and glass. Museum collections in London and Delhi hold examples of Katesari pieces from the early 1900s. They look, even in archival photographs, remarkably alive.

The origins of Katesari — craft, community, and the Gangetic plain

Katesari is rooted in the silversmithing communities of Uttar Pradesh, particularly the areas associated with the Ganga-Yamuna tehzeeb — the syncretic cultural tradition of the Gangetic plain that blended Hindu and Mughal-era Persian influences into something distinctly North Indian. This cultural context shaped the jewelry of the region: pieces that were ornate but not ostentatious, ceremonial but wearable, made for real women navigating real occasions. The foil-backed glass technique itself has a longer history than Katesari alone. Foil-backed glass was used across India and the Islamic world as a less costly alternative to gemstones — glass could be shaped, coloured, and sized to specification in ways that precious stones could not, and foil backing gave it the brilliance that bare glass lacks. What made Katesari distinctive was the way this technique was systematised into a specific jewelry form, with its own grammar of shapes, arrangements, and symbolic elements. The tikka — the red dot at the centre of the key glass settings — is not incidental. Red has deep auspicious significance in Hindu tradition: the colour of Shakti, of the sindoor that marks a married woman, of celebration and ceremony. Its presence at the heart of a Katesari piece marks the jewelry as more than decorative. It marks it as meaningful.

The technique — how Katesari is made

The glass

The glass used in Katesari jewelry is clear or lightly tinted, hand-cut into precise geometric or floral shapes — quatrefoils, teardrops, rounds, ovals. The cutting requires steady hands and an understanding of how the glass will behave under the cutter; the wrong angle or too much pressure and the shape cracks. Each piece of glass must be cut individually, there is no mould or template, and no two pieces are perfectly identical.

The foil

Once cut, each glass piece is backed with a thin layer of reflective foil — silver-toned for the classic moonlit effect, gold-toned for warmth. The foil is cut slightly larger than the glass, folded carefully over the edges, and held in place by the silver bezel that will surround the setting. The quality of this step determines the quality of the finished piece: poorly aligned foil shows through the glass as wrinkles or gaps, destroying the luminous effect. Done well, the foil disappears behind the glass and you see only light.

The silver work

The silver settings — the bezels that hold each glass piece, the connecting elements between them, the pendant ghungroos — are worked separately and assembled around the glass. Traditional Katesari silver is typically 70–80% purity, consistent with pre-hallmarking silversmithing practice across North India. The metal is worked by hand using stamping dies and fine tools to create the surface decoration that characterises the tradition. The assembly of a full Katesari choker — setting each glass piece into its bezel, connecting the elements, attaching the ghungroos, stringing the whole onto cord — is several days of work for a skilled artisan. It cannot be rushed. It cannot be mechanised without losing the quality that makes it Katesari.

What Katesari jewelry looks like — and how to recognise it

A genuine Katesari piece has several distinctive characteristics that separate it from reproductions or contemporary pieces inspired by the tradition.

The glass has depth. Foil-backed glass has a quality of luminosity that coloured or painted glass does not. Hold a genuine Katesari piece up to the light and the glass seems to glow from within rather than reflect from the surface. It is subtle, and it is unmistakeable once you have seen it.

The silver is not uniform. Hand-worked silver has slight variations in surface — the die-stamped patterns are consistent in design but not in exact impression. The bezels holding the glass elements are set by hand, which means each one is fractionally different from the next. These small irregularities are the signature of the handmade.

The ghungroos ring. Authentic vintage Katesari pieces have tiny silver bells that produce a soft, clear sound when the piece moves. This is not decorative afterthought — the sound of a woman's jewelry was itself considered auspicious in many North Indian traditions, marking her arrival and her presence.

The patina is earned. Genuine vintage Katesari pieces have aged naturally — the silver has developed an uneven patina, deeper in recesses and lighter on high points, that no amount of artificial oxidation quite replicates. This patina is not a flaw. It is the record of the piece's life before it reached you.

The present — a craft on the edge of disappearing

Katesari is not a well-documented craft. It does not appear in most surveys of Indian jewelry traditions. There is no government scheme protecting it, no GI tag marking its origin, no artisan cooperative sustaining production. The families who practiced it in Uttar Pradesh's silversmithing communities were small in number even at the tradition's height, and most have now moved to other work. Their children and grandchildren are not silversmiths. What survives in circulation is what was made when the craft was alive. Authentic vintage Katesari pieces — the original chokers, pendants, and smaller ornaments produced by these artisan families across the early and mid twentieth century — are now extremely rare. They appear occasionally in estate sales and heirloom collections, in the inventories of dealers who know what they are looking at, and very rarely in museum collections. There is no meaningful new production. A handful of jewelers have attempted contemporary pieces inspired by the Katesari technique — glass backed with foil set in silver — but the knowledge of how to replicate the specific quality of the original work is largely gone. The difference between a contemporary Katesari-inspired piece and an authentic vintage one is the difference between a photograph of a landscape and the landscape itself.

Why it matters — the case for preserving Katesari

Every craft that disappears takes with it a way of seeing and a way of making that cannot be fully reconstructed from documentation. Katesari's particular contribution — the idea that glass, properly backed and properly set, can be as luminous as any gemstone — is a genuinely original insight. It democratised a quality of light that had previously required precious stones to achieve. It made something extraordinary accessible to ordinary women. The chokers and pendants made in this tradition were not made for queens. They were made for the women of the Gangetic plain, for ceremonies and festivals and ordinary significant days. They were passed down through families, worn thin and bright with use, eventually ending up in the collections of people who recognized in them something worth keeping. That history of use is inseparable from what they are. Preserving Katesari — or at least preserving the pieces that were made when it was alive — is a form of cultural memory. It keeps the insight available, keeps the aesthetic alive, keeps open the possibility that someone, somewhere, will look at a genuine Katesari piece and understand what it was trying to do and find a way to carry it forward.

Katesari at Sadabahaar — how we carry this tradition

Sadabahaar's relationship with Katesari began, as most of our deepest relationships do, with a single piece: the Khusrau kada. This was followed by our earnest attempts to find more such jewels, which led us to the Mehtaab pendant, its name meaning moonlight. Mehtaab is a vintage silver pendant whose heart is a piece of white foil-backed glass in the Katesari tradition. The glass glows softly, luminously, in a way that photographs only partially capture. It is the kind of piece that is more beautiful in person than in any image of it. We carry Katesari pieces when we can find them — which is rarely, because authentic pieces are genuinely rare. When they do come into our collection, they are part of our Vintage Finds: sourced carefully, assessed for authenticity, described honestly, and priced for what they are — irreplaceable things, not reproductions. We do not make new Katesari pieces, because we do not believe in selling inspiration as tradition. What we have is what was made. When it is gone, it is gone. That is the nature of authentic vintage jewelry, and we think that honesty is part of its value. If you find a Katesari piece in our Vintage Finds collection — a pendant, a choker element, an earring — do not wait. These pieces have survived for decades. They deserve a home that understands them.

Further reading:

What Is Authentic Vintage Silver Jewelry? A Complete Guide
Rajasthani Tribal Silver Jewelry — A Living Craft Tradition
The Vanki Ring: Meaning, History and Pure Silver Designs