Enduring Splendor focuses on the rich and diverse silver jewelry traditions of India's Thar Desert region, stretching across the western states of Rajasthan and Gujarat. These traditions are considered against the background of the five-thousand-year history of jewelry making across the vast Indian Subcontinent. Drawing on recent field research carried out in the city of Jaisalmer, a thriving center of contemporary jewelry production, Enduring Splendor explores for the first time the life and work of four sonis (silversmiths or goldsmiths). To contextualize this recent production, numerous illustrations of very fine examples of ninteenth- and twentieth-century jewelry types that are still worn are included. These objects have been borrowed from the Ronald and Maxine Linde Collection of Jewelry and Ritual Arts of India, part of a promised gift to UCLA, where it will find its future home with the Fowler Museum. The Linde Collection is one of the finest and most comprehensive collections of Indian jewelry in the world. This volume highlights elaborate rural styles rendered in silver as well as selected ornate examples, largely associated with the elite, made with gold and gemstones.

本書は、インド・タール砂漠の過酷な風土で磨かれた銀細工を、単なる装飾品ではなく五千年の文明が宿る「魂の結晶」として描き出しています。ジャイサルメールで火花を散らす現代の彫金師たちの息遣いと、十九世紀から伝わる緻密な造形美が交錯する様は、まさに圧巻。職人の手仕事に宿る神聖な美学が、ページをめくるごとに鮮烈に立ち上がります。 リンデ・コレクションという世界最高峰の資料を軸に、土着の銀と華麗な貴石が織りなす対比は、多層的な信仰と社会の縮図そのものです。静止したジュエリーの裏側に、受け継がれる伝統の躍動と人間讃歌を読み解く。工芸史の枠を超え、物質が放つ根源的な生命力に圧倒される、情熱的な知の探究がここにあります。