Bhagavata Puranam necklaces

I started my journey with picture jewellery 15 years ago working with old images that I liked to digitally restore. I few years back I chanced upon antique Indo-French folios that translated into the Ramayana necklaces. This time around, I have explored other illustrated folios from the same collection to restore images and create necklaces. Here is the first two of them from the golden illustrated folio of Bhagavata Puranam created in 1793 with Sanskrit text and is now available at National Library, Paris.

Bhagavata Puranam

The Bhagavata Puranam, or the Śrīmad Bhāgavatam is one of the eighteen major Purāṇas of Hindu literature and a foundational text of Vaishnavism. Attributed to the sage Vyasa, it comprises twelve books (skandhas) that explore the manifestations or Avatars of Vishnu. It is a storified version of Vedas and Upanishads, an attempt to communicate abstract ideas of cosmology, philosophy, devotion (bhakti) in the form of stories. Find the English translation of Bhagavata Puranam by GV Tagare here.

Paintings illustrating the Bhagavata Puranam translate its narratives into visual form. There are multiple texts and illustrators who have worked on the same, across centuries, depicting episodes from the various avatars of Lord Vishnu. Illustrated manuscripts often combined painted folios with corresponding passages of text, allowing viewers to engage with the stories through both reading and viewing.

Bhagavata Puranam necklaces

I started with the images first picking one I was familiar with and one less familiar. The first is a scene portraying Amrit Manthan. I had described the story in my old post on Navaratri golu on Story and Storytelling. It is the story of Devas and Asuras coming together to churn the ocean for the elixir of immortality. As this image was in great condition, I did a little image editing, decopaged it on a MDF bases. I added the kundan stones and sealed it with resin.

Typically I leave the backs of my picture jewellery plain. This time I used resin to give it a texture and then added patterns using metallic paints making the piece double-sided. The necklace is a four-strand pre-made pearl necklace with blue agate beads. This Amrit Manthan necklace is available for sale.

 The second is once again a 3×3 pendant with agate beads, a four strand pearl necklace. I worked on this image quite a bot adding borders, cleaning up edges and brightening the scene. This pendant also has kundan stones, a glossy resin finish and a textured back. This necklace is sold.
You can see videos of the necklaces on my Instagram here and here.

I hope you find this interesting. I will be back with the other pieces that I made and the coverage of my ongoing Navaratri golu which focuses on jewellery.

Cheers