To journey through Northeast India is to enter a world where jewellery doesn’t just adorn the body—it speaks. Across the Brahmaputra plains and the cloud-brushed hills of Arunachal, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Meghalaya, ornaments act like tiny declarations of identity: signalling clan, status, age, memory and belonging. Anthropologists call this the “body as canvas,” and few places paint that canvas more vividly. A flash of coral on a Khasi woman, the warm weight of brass on an Apatani elder, the gleam of an Assamese jonbiri—each becomes a line in a living cultural script, a text travellers can learn to read as they move through this richly layered region.
Long before modern highways snaked through the hills, Northeast India was part of a tremendous, interlinked world of movement. Beads, metals and ideas travelled upriver from Assam, crossed Manipur’s valley marts, slipped through mountain passes, and even rode the vast currents of the Indian Ocean.
Glass beads in cobalt blue, Indo-Pacific red, or Venetian golden-amber found their way into the necklaces of Naga, Adi and Apatani families. Carnelian travelled from ancient workshops in Gujarat, shell discs from the coasts, metal from the plains. A single heirloom necklace in the hills could contain a history of half the subcontinent, strung together into a private geography of migration and memory.
The colonial era layered another chapter onto this story. Administrators and missionaries, fascinated by what they termed “tribal ornaments,” catalogued and often appropriated pieces that now rest in European museums. Their records remain invaluable—yet their collecting practices left communities without objects that had carried ritual and ancestral weight for generations, an absence that still echoes through conversations on heritage and return.
Meanwhile, the plains produced their own luminous world of craft. In Assam, gold was not mined but washed—panned from rivers by specialists who passed the skill down. These gold washers and the sonari goldsmith castes developed techniques of filigree, repoussé, and gold-plated silver that gave Assamese ornaments their delicate, airy glow. Supported by Ahom courts, they turned motifs from the natural world—peacocks, lilies, elephants—into wearable miniatures of the valley’s imagination.
To understand the jewelry of the NE, one must understand the deep intimacy of the land with the landscape(s). Gold and silver link the plains to riverine abundance. Brass and copper mirror the warm glow of hearths in the hills. Beads speak of journeys that cut across oceans and kingdoms. But natural materials—bone, horn, boar tusks, feathers—anchor adornment to ecological relationships and ritual cosmologies.
In Naga and Arunachal communities, the gleam of animal horn or the curve of a tusk carries stories of hunting, protection, and masculine prestige. Among the Aos or Konyaks, certain bead combinations once marked a man who had completed warrior rites or held renown in feasts of merit. Among Apatanis, heirloom beads are inherited with ceremony, believed to contain powers that speak to the spirits of fields and ancestors. In the Assamese plains, however, the eye is drawn to the intricate play of metal—tiny birds poised in gold filigree, floral lines rendered with astonishing delicacy. Karbi motifs move in another direction altogether, capturing the energy of hills through geometric rhythms.
Travelling across the Northeast feels like moving through a living gallery where each state paints its own relationship with beauty, status, ritual and memory. Jewellery becomes the thread that binds these landscapes together—gold shimmering over riverine plains, beads glowing in high valleys, coral burning bright in the misted hills. Each region speaks in its own accent, yet all participate in a shared poetry of adornment.
From birth to old age, jewellery quietly maps the arc of a life in the Northeast. Infants in several Arunachal communities receive protective charms of claws or beads; adolescence arrives with first necklaces or earrings that signal maturity and readiness for partnership. Marriage transforms the body’s ornamented story: Khasi, Jaintia and Meitei families exchange coral and gold as bridewealth, while in some Naga groups a man’s gift of bead strands or boar-tusk ornaments reflects his standing and ability to provide. Even in later years, jewellery remains a measure of lived experience—whether in the bead combinations reserved for a Naga man who has completed a feast of merit or in the ritual pieces worn by respected elders in Arunachal.
Jewellery-making in the Northeast often reflects gendered labour traditions: in the Assamese plains, goldsmithing has long been a male, caste-based craft, while across the hills bead-work is largely in women’s hands, giving them roles as designers, makers and traders. Today, women’s cooperatives, craft collectives and bodies like NEHHDC have strengthened these traditions into sustainable livelihoods. Yet the act of wearing jewellery need not mirror these divisions—among the Garo, for instance, rigitok bead necklaces belong to both men and women, reminding us that adornment can be a shared, communal language rather than a strictly gendered one.
The last century has reshaped how jewellery is worn and understood in the Northeast. Christian missions, education and urban migration pushed many traditions out of daily life and into festival wardrobes, museum cases and collective memory. Yet revival is unmistakable: cultural bodies, museums, artisans and grassroots groups are documenting and reinventing old designs, while Assamese pieces like the jonbiri and lokaparo have surged into mainstream fashion through social media and e-commerce. With growing conversations around GI tags and cultural ownership, communities are increasingly defining what authenticity means—and how their artistic heritage should move through the wider world.
Equal parts policy wonk and wanderlust junkie, Kavya brings together her training in environmental economics and political science with an enduring curiosity about how the world works — and how it could work better. By day, she’s a public health researcher and advocate, working at the intersection of people, systems, and the planet.
Off the clock? She’s a storyteller, active rester, and cat mama.
