This Gujarati casket comprises a rectangular box and a truncatedpyramidal lid, sloping on each side to a flat top, and is made of teak(Tectona grandis) covered with mother-of-pearl mosaic.The tesserae, cut from the shell of the green turban sea snail(Turbo marmoratus, a marine gastropod) and from pearl oyster—probably Pinctada maxima, given its whitish hue—are attachedto the wooden structure with large ball-headed silver nails thatreplaced the original brass pins.The truncated pyramidal shape corresponds—like its contemporarytortoiseshell counterparts, also made in Gujarat—toa type of furniture used in the Indian subcontinent under Islamicrule before the arrival of the first Portuguese. This form is bothancient and characteristic of East Asian caskets, chests or boxesmade to contain and protect Buddhist texts (sutras).1Raised on a socle, the casket features, on the front, sidesand back, two variants of an overlapping scale pattern: one withrounded edges and the other with straight ones. By contrast, thestraight sides of the lid display a lozenge-and-triangle pattern.The interior is simply decorated in vivid red shellac. The casket isfurther embellished with silver mounts of European manufacture,added when it arrived in Europe. All the edges of the casket areprotected by thin silver bands decorated with a chased frieze ofovules. The lock plate on the front and the hinges at the back aresimilarly chased with vegetal motifs. The Gujarati origin of this production has, over the pastfew decades, become widely accepted and fully demonstrated,not only through documentary and literary evidence—such asdescriptions, travelogues and contemporary archival documents—but also through the survival in situ of sixteenth-century woodenstructures covered in mother-of-pearl tesserae.2A fine example is the canopy that decorates the tomb ofthe Sufi saint Sheikh Salim Chisti (1478–1572) at Fatehpur Sikri, inthe Agra district of northern India. This production is geometricin character and Islamic in nature: the mother-of-pearl tesseraetypically form complex fish-scale designs or, as on dishes madewith the same technique using thin brass sheet and pins, stylisedlotus flowers.
HMC