Glass Bangles in India: Antiquity, Functional Use and Traditional Production

Abstract

Since mid-second millennium BCE, glass bangles have been an item of mass consumption throughout South Asia. The archaeological community has spent considerable time and energy reconstructing ancient cities with evidence of glass making and/or glass working workshops and has formulated many hypotheses. The functional use of the kiln and the ways that different kinds of glass products, including bangle were produced is still shrouded in uncertainty. Jointless bangles have been considered as auspicious and they dominate the archaeological bangle assemblages. At times, glass bangles are used as one of the criteria to hypothesise ancient demographics. Their usage patterns of glass bangles and their relation to socio-cultural milieu, continuously create more broken pieces than intact bangles in cultural deposit. The fact that glass bangles are given as offerings in lieu of wellbeing and that broken bangles are recycled present challenges for any archaeological reconstructions and inferences. Notwithstanding these challenges, examination of the traditional jointless bangle production centre in western Uttar Pradesh facilitates a more insightful understanding of the nature of meaningful socialistic and technocratic affordances constitutive to bangles. This paper records ethnographically the production cycle and the functional use of bangles. The evolution of bangle making furnaces is also discussed.