“Unbound by beads is an expedition considering the glass bead as a lens through which questions of value, memory and cultural continuity come into focus”
WHAT IF A BEAD COULD TELL A STORY THAT A DIAMOND COULD NOT?
MAP OF JOURNEY
For centuries, they have done just that. Beads have made their way across oceans and trade routes, over borders and through markets finding their way to the women of Kutch, carrying echoes of past memories.
“Monsoon winds became winds of change when the trade ships carrying glass beads pushed the sea of life towards the women of Kutch and Kathiawar”
In the process their significance has been transformed. They became wedding rituals and dowries, gifts and patterns handed down from mother to daughter. The women here have fashioned them into a language all their own.
On the surface there is nothing considerably precious about a piece of glass bought by the kilo. But look closer and you will see another sort of value at play.
DISPLAY OF OLD BEADED OBJECTS
That is where Unbound by Beads began.
How do you place a glass bead beside a diamond? How do you ask a wearer to hold both in the same reverence?
Our founder Puja Shah took these questions with her to Kutch and Kathiawar for a year of field research. She would sit in the courtyard and observe hands in motion, moving faster than any conversation around her. When she asked the women there what a bead meant, she found answers that had never been put to paper. This was deliberate since the meaning was held in the objects themselves, not on paper.
“A poetic meditation on memory, craft and cultural identity”
To these women the work is a kind of flow, a meditation. The mind ceases to direct and then hand, eye and rhythm settle into one continuous motion as motifs are brought to life, bead by bead.
A MATERIAL WITH A MEMORY
PICTURE OF THEM MAKING IT
By the time the beads arrived in Kutch, they had already seen the world. From the 17th century glassmaking of Venice to the maritime routes of Africa and West Asia, and then arriving in India through Gujarati cotton trading networks.
What has also travelled is the craft itself from mother to daughter and generation to generation.
“Put a pin anywhere on the globe, and chances are you will find a glass beadwork tradition, and a story behind it. Ours was simply waiting in Kutch.”
Here, they were woven into the fabric of daily and ceremonial life, be it a toran for guests or a beaded sword cover for the groom and a bag made for the daughter’s wedding.
Today, this craft known as Pirai, is being made for moments worth remembering, adding new memories to what these beads already carried.
PICTURE OF THESE OBJECTS
“Every bead stitch ties them with their surrounding”
Glass beadworking is a marker of identity and belonging for Meghwal women, only passed down from mothers to daughters, never sold, it is tied to how these women preserve and express who they are. For migratory communities like theirs, who own little land, and move for water and vegetation, home is not a fixed place and is held together instead by living traditions like these.
SOCIETY OF JEWELLERY HISTORIANS AT THE BURLINGTON HOUSE
LONDON, JUNE 2025
The project made its scholarly debut at a symposium of the Society of Jewellery Historians, moderated by Melanie Grant. The question in discussion was straightforward enough:
Why beads?
Puja: “Because beading is one of jewellery's most enduring, most sophisticated languages, yet one of its most misunderstood. It is dismissed, too often, as repetitive, as ornamental and as beneath the notice of scholarship.”
The reality is quite the contrary. Beading is a discipline demanding precision and a rhythm that can take a lifetime to master and a single knot to undo. Gold and gemstone get the attention, but beads have adorned deities and courts for centuries. They are the carriers of lineage and knowledge, something that written records have long overlooked.
This was not a claim made lightly since by the time the room gathered in London, the research behind it was already a year deep with months spent in the courtyards of Kutch and Kathiawar, gathering a history that had never been documented because it did not need to be. It lived instead in the techniques and objects themselves.
Grant questioned the authorship of jewellery
Who is the maker when a technique has existed for centuries? How do brands responsibly position themselves when working with inherited forms? In this craft the answer became clear. Every artisan has a lineage too long to attribute to a single source and therefore authorship is generational and collective.
The discussion was moved away from viewing craft through a nostalgia lens
Our founders made the case for an engagement with heritage that does not freeze it in time. Traditional techniques are kept adaptive and relevant since the worth is in the hand that makes it, not the material.
GALLERY DIFFERENT
LONDON, JUNE 2025
Later that month, the focus at the Gallery Different in London shifted from the history of the craft to the women who have been the bearers of beadwork history.
“Unbound by Beads reflects the dual nature of the tradition,” Puja Shah noted during the discussion. “On one hand, beads are physically bound by a single thread; on the other, the craft gave women a form of creative freedom and social identity within rigid cultural frameworks. It bound and liberated all at once.”
Looking to go further, they came across references to beadworking communities near Barmer, Rajasthan, and that’s when PAC came in. A mutual contact introduced Puja and Kunal to HRH Princess Gauravi Kumari of Jaipur, who had already seen Moi's work at London Craft Week 2025. PKDF's Artisan Collective, had established relationships in the region and helped the artisans travel three hours northwest of Barmer to meet Puja and Kunal. That meeting became the starting point for this project, and with trust already in place, the partnership between PAC and Moi formed quickly.
THE AMETHYST
CHENNAI, SEPT 2025
“A love letter to legacy”
There is a considered quality to The Amethyst in Chennai, a place where one can find art, design and heritage coexisting with the contemporary. It made for an apt venue for Unbound by Beads to put some tangible substance to the ideas and research of the project.
At the centre were The Moi Collectibles, an ode to India’s craft traditions and ingenuity and sense of belonging that is stitched into each piece, into every thread and bead.
Morgan
Kunal: I would point to the tortoise pieces from the Collectible aries as my pick from the Morgans. They have become something of an unofficial mascot for the brand, carrying the symbolism of wisdom, longevity and luck. In Moi, Morgan has taken on a life of its own as the archivist and the timekeeper, the wiser counterpart to my own restless energy.
THE AMETHYST
KOCHI, DEC 2025
One has to ask what makes a collectible in the first place and the story of Unbound by Beads travelled further to ask this question.
We made our way to the House of Vandy for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the longest running contemporary art biennale in South Asia, India’s first. It was only the only natural next chapter as one of India’s historic port cities, shaped by the movement of materials and ideas across the sea, much like the path of the bead to Gujarat.
