Shankha Pola Bangles: A Legacy of the Ancient World

Words by Titas Banerji

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This painting was done by Horace Van Ruith in the 1880s as a documentary record of costume and jewellery of the region of Punjab. The woman is wearing her full set of head, ear, nose, neck, arm, hand, ankle and foot jewellery and a costume richly decorated with 'zardozi' (gold wire/thread) embroidery. She lifts her blue gathered skirt with gold-embroidered border to show her silver anklets and toe rings, and at the same time shows the mirror ring on the thumb of her left hand and gold finger rings attached to her bracelets by gold chains. Her shoes are in front of her bare feet. (Available now as Print)

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Shankha Pola Bangles: A Legacy of the Ancient World

Weddings constitute a major part of South Asian cultures. Popular movies, books, and even chunks of our lives have been built around getting married in grandeur. So, it isn’t surprising that some of the important elements of weddings across South Asia might have retained their characteristics from ancient cultures. A lot of these components are, in fact, symbolic—of wealth, long married life, fertility, and much more. In parts of India and Bangladesh, married women from certain Hindu cultures wear white conch shell bangles - Shankha - usually accompanied by a red coral bangle - Pola. Mostly worn by women of the Bengali community, these bangles are symbolic of their marital status. While we might have spotted these in Bollywood movies and wanted to flaunt them as kids growing up in the culture, these have quite a long history.

The coral bangles are associated with the fishing communities spread over the long coastline. The legacy of shell bangles, however, goes back as far as the Bronze Age. Jewelry historians have even discovered some interesting parallels between these modern shell bangles and the burial ornaments of the oldest civilization in the region - the Indus Valley Civilization - which spread over parts of present-day India and Pakistan.