In Jaipur, Craft is a Family Inheritance: Meenakari and the Making of Collectibles

Heritage in India isn’t taught in classrooms—it’s absorbed at home. Craft here isn’t theory; it’s inheritance: fathers to sons, mothers to daughters, and artisans to apprentices. Walking into the Museum of Meenakari in Jaipur, I realised I wasn’t stepping into a gallery. I was stepping into memory, into work that has been passed hand to hand for centuries, enamelled into permanence by fire and patience.

I had come to Jaipur for 48 hours: part travelogue, part initiation. One day was spent wandering through the museum’s kaleidoscope of enamel—centuries of meenakari in peacock greens, bougainvillea pinks, and impossible blues. The other was spent watching Sunita Shekhawat unveil Collectibles, her new line of enamelled objets d’art, in a launch that blurred the line between jewellery, craft, and contemporary culture.

Meenakari as Continuity

The more I walked through the museum, the more I understood meenakari not as decoration, but as continuity. This craft, brought to Jaipur by Persian artisans centuries ago, has survived because families refused to let it die. Generations of meenakars have carried fire in their breath and enamel on their fingertips, handing down techniques the way others hand down family recipes.

At one workbench, I watched an artisan lift a brush so fine it held fewer than ten hairs. He bent close, exhaling steadily as he guided liquid pigment into the groove of a motif. One wrong stroke, one misjudged firing, and weeks of work would vanish. That patience, that refusal to compromise, is what has kept Meenakari alive.

The Museum of Meenakari

Founded by Sunita Shekhawat as the first space dedicated solely to this craft, the Museum of Meenakari is both archive and argument. It insists that meenakari belongs to the world stage, as valuable as Murano glass, Limoges enamel, or Fabergé eggs. The vitrines hold centuries of enamelled splendour, but they also whisper stories of artisans who perfected ronde-bosse or plique-à-jour, of families who kept secrets of firing and pigment alive across generations.

Walking through the rooms, I felt less like a tourist and more like a guest in someone’s ancestral home. It was intimate, unapologetically Indian, and quietly revolutionary.

Collectibles by Sunita

The launch of Collectibles unfolded like theatre. Curated by Eeshaan Kashyap, it was a sensory staging of enamel reimagined: pill boxes glowing in enamelled blues, bougainvillaea boxes that turned flora into jewellery, and enamelled horses that felt sculptural and almost mythic.

Shekhawat’s ambition here isn’t to make more jewellery. It’s to prove that meenakari doesn’t need to be worn to matter—it can live as an object, a collectable, a symbol of heritage that migrates from the vault to the living room.

The price tags (₹1.25 lakh to ₹18.5 lakh) mark these objects as luxury, yes. But the craft within them belongs to everyone—each brushstroke an inheritance from artisans whose work you may never know by name.

The People Behind the Enamel

This is what struck me most. Behind every collectable is not just design, but devotion. Meenakars sit for hours, applying enamel with brushes that would look absurd in another profession but are essential here. The rhythm is slow, deliberate, and unforgiving. It’s not production; it’s preservation in motion.

Shekhawat calls Collectibles her way of blurring jewellery and object, but it’s also her way of ensuring that artisans remain part of India’s cultural conversation. To buy one of these objects is to buy into that continuum. In an India where luxury is often shorthand for the global—the new launch, the logo bag, the imported aesthetic—Collectibles felt different. It was rooted, not borrowed. It asked us to reimagine what luxury could look like when it is crafted rather than consumed.

Parting Note

For me, those 48 hours in Jaipur felt less like an assignment and more like a homecoming. As someone who writes about beauty, I’m used to packaging, innovation, and marketing cycles. But enamel reminded me that true luxury is slower, heavier, and inherited. It’s fire, colour, and the quiet endurance of craft.

Meenakari, I realised, is not just an art form. It’s a refusal—to disappear, to dilute, to be forgotten. And Sunita Shekhawat’s Collectibles are the next chapter of that refusal: objects that look forward while carrying centuries in their shine.