Jewellery of Jammu & Kashmir

The craftsmen of Jammu and Kashmir have over the years excelled in the art of making jewellery

with stones, gold and silver. They have transformed their skills onto making ornaments with

finesse and ingenuity. The rural men and women folk in Jammu and Kashmir wear huge circular

ear rings called kundalas while large anklets called nupura are worn by the rural women in

Jammu.Srinagar, a centre for precious and semi-precious jewellery is flooded with traditional

as well as modern designs. Most of the jewellery is custom made to met the demand of the ever

increasing market. Jammu city has goldsmiths who repeatedly make traditional designs of jhumkas

and naths for local consumers. The jewellery of Ladakh region is unique, distinctive, and bears

links to its regional history.The Ladakhi women wear an ornament called sondus or branshil, a

marriage symbol fixed on the left shoulder which has a few gold or silver discs connected by a

number of long silver strands and is given by a mother to her daughter at the time of marriage.

An extraordinary head dress called perak, are worn by Ladakhi women wear, and has between 20 and

200 large turquoise and other stones set across a wide leather piece.