When the first trailer for Nitesh Tiwari’s Ramayana dropped, the jewellery caught the eye instantly: the breastplate on Ravana, the armlets on Ram, even an elephant adorned with ornaments of its own. There are vast landscapes and imposing sets too, but look closer and another kind of world-building is happening around the necks, wrists, ears and heads of almost everyone on screen.
Behind those frames is an 18-month exercise led by Tarang Arora, CEO and creative director of Amrapali Jewels, and his team at Tribe Amrapali — one that has so far produced more than 4,000 pieces for what is being positioned as Indian cinema’s most ambitious mythological spectacle to date.
Scaling the Sacred
Amrapali did not arrive at this project cold. The house has designed jewellery for Baahubali, Manikarnika and Tumbbad, a résumé built on its expertise in Indian craftsmanship. But Ramayana is a different order of scale. “When we’ve done movies before, we’ve done one character, maybe two,” Arora says. “Here, everyone is important. You’re not doing one film, you’re doing 10.”
The jewellery had to do something the audience might not consciously notice but would instinctively understand: tell them who these characters were, where they stood, and what they were feeling.
For Arora, the project carries generational weight. He remembers watching Ramayan on Doordarshan as a child, when Sunday mornings revolved around the television. Now, he says, this is the Ramayana his children’s generation — and the one after it — may remember for the rest of their lives. “Whenever you think of Ram, whenever you think of Krishna, whenever you think of Yudhishthir, you have these characters in your mind,” he says.
That familiarity was the first challenge. There is no single image of the Ramayana — its characters have been interpreted through television, cinema, paintings and popular art for decades, and creating another visual language for them meant negotiating with images audiences already carry in their heads.
Coded in Karat
For Tribe Amrapali, the answer was research — into Indian ornamentation, sculpture, regional traditions and the Amrapali Museum’s archive, which has long served as the house’s design touchstone. But the work wasn’t about looking sufficiently ancient. The team had to understand the characters and the specific moments being depicted.
“Ram is, of course, God, but he’s a husband and he’s a son and he’s a brother,” Arora explains, adding, “To be able to make sure that we are doing justice to his character... has taken a lot of time for us.”
The jewellery, therefore, couldn’t exist independently of the story. Ram in Ayodhya couldn’t look like Ram in exile; a warrior can’t wear the ornaments of a courtier. In the forest, the jewellery had to recede. When Sita is captured and drops her ornaments, those exact pieces become part of the narrative. “You cannot have a wrong necklace or a wrong piece when a portrayal of that is happening,” Arora says.
The same logic extended to Ravana, whose pieces had to reflect his power, his devotion to Shiva, and Lanka’s distinct visual language — imposing and regal but rooted in a specific geography and shifting with his state of mind. The result is less a jewellery collection than a system of visual codes, one that changes with character, geography, emotion and time.
Architecture of Adornment
All 4,000-plus pieces were made fresh for the production, even as the designers returned constantly to the museum for reference. A motif could be borrowed, enlarged or reinterpreted, but nothing on screen was pulled from existing inventory.
Nor was any piece designed in isolation. Colours had to respond to costumes and sets; a motif could be rejected because the same shape was already visible in the curtains behind a character. An ear cuff couldn’t interfere with a crown, an earring couldn’t compete with a hair ornament — for the women especially, this could mean several layers working at once, all needing to coexist without clashing. “The look and the colours and the vibe have to be the same,” Arora says. “We use the same stone over
and over again to [put the] look together.”
The jewellery also had to be large enough to register on an IMAX-scale frame while remaining wearable. That was not, Arora admits, a smooth process. “There’s been everything with designs, with characters, with timings, with change of designs... with things breaking,” he says.
Repairs were arranged locally, and something that looked perfect in the design room could become a problem the moment an actor wore it. Arora recalls a video of an artisan trying on Ravana’s chest plate, walking around in it, checking whether it hurt or restricted movement — a small, telling glimpse of a process running on tight turnarounds.
Beyond the Frame
The museum’s influence extended past the human cast: after the trailer revealed elephants in elaborate jewellery, Arora, careful not to claim credit for the final CGI treatment, says the team shared references from the museum’s collection of animal ornaments and processional objects. The connection is personal too. “It’s like there are two kids, Amrapali and Tribe, and the mother is Amrapali,” he says.
Craft, not the IMAX format, remained the priority throughout. “If we are going to be part of something like a Ramayana, then we have to do our best,” Arora says. “We have to not let anyone down.”
The research changed his own understanding of the epic, from a childhood lesson in how to live, to something larger on revisiting it as an adult. “Both Ram, Ramayana or Hinduism is much more than a religion, much more than a belief system,” he says. “It’s the way of life.”
Some of the more elaborate, non-wearable pieces won’t disappear once filming wraps — two sections of the Amrapali Museum, which already holds work from Baahubali and Manikarnika, are reserved for the Ramayana collection. A commercial line inspired by the film is also planned for Tribe Amrapali.
Arora invokes Raja Ravi Varma, whose paintings shaped how generations of Indians pictured their gods. “I think they were the starting point of us understanding what gods and goddesses were,” he says. “Giving that a life is something which is amazing.”
If he’s right about how visual memory works, some of these 4,000-odd pieces may do the same for the next one.