In most Indian homes, there are two places where jewellery lives. Gold goes in the locked cupboard — top shelf, with a hidden key kept somewhere your mother will never quite specify. And silver goes in the drawer. But this arrangement is no accident, it’s architecture. It’s the physical manifestation of a hierarchy so old, that nobody questions it anymore: gold is precious, silver is practical. Gold is an investment, silver is starter jewellery. Gold is real, and silver is… waiting.
Come Dhanteras 2025, the waiting ended. For perhaps the first time in recent memory, the consumer demand for silver outpaced gold in sales. Not because people couldn’t afford gold, though with climbing prices hovering around INR 1,30,000 per 10 grams during the festive season, that’s increasingly true, but because they chose not to. Silver has delivered nearly 50% returns over the past year, coin sales surged 35% year-on-year and overall value more than doubled, even as gold sales dipped by 15%. A generation raised on ‘save for gold’ looked at silver and thought: what if this is actually what I want?
Jaipur-based Meghna Ratra chose silver long before the market validated her instinct. When she found Maison Megh in 2024, every commercial pressure pointed toward gold. The hierarchy has persisted so long that it’s become the unspoken norm that shapes the entire jewellery ecosystem. Meghna followed exactly one rule: work in precious metal. Then broke everything else.
From Maison Megh’s debut collection, Earth is Square — 1: Edge Pendant with Gems; 2: Edge Ear Cuff with Gems
“Silver has always been a metal South Asians are related to,” she explains, and the phrasing matters — culturally familiar and emotionally entangled. “[On an occasion of birth], you gift them a chandi ki paayal or kada. At various festivals and occasions, silver has always brought love and care. That’s the energy it carries.” This emotional architecture, built through decades of gifting and receiving, informed her material choice as much as any economic calculation. “It’s the metal I think of whenever I think of India, whenever I think of Jaipur,” she says.
But emotion alone doesn’t sustain a luxury brand in a market conditioned to calculate value in grams of gold multiplied by current rates. Meghna wanted to honour the Indian attitude towards jewellery as an asset, recognising that what you wear on your body isn’t trivial and that jewellery serves as security — something that holds when everything else fails. “A lot of Indians still look at jewellery as an investment, not just for fashion,” she says.
Silver offered what gold couldn’t: freedom. “Gold is such a traditional metal, very rooted in a certain way,” she says. “But silver is very inviting. It allows me to be emotional with it in different ways.” Materially, silver’s malleability enables forms that gold’s density would resist. Maison Megh’s signature hollow squares from their first collection — Earth Is Square — required lengthy prototyping. “Everybody thinks it’s just a simple, bold motif, a square with a hole cut in it, but it took us a long time to get the plating right,” she shares.
1: Inspired by hopscotch, Kitthh Kitthh is Maison Megh’s second act, about stepping, skipping, and constant rebirth; 2:The Earth is Square stands as a convergence of disciplines, cultures, and visions
This is where Maison Megh’s proposition becomes iconoclastic: precious material deployed without precious codes. Silver, yes, but stripped of every traditional Indian jewellery reference. No jhumkas, paisleys, or temple forms, her approach is deliberately non-traditional. Meghna draws inspiration directly from the Le Corbusier-designed architecture of Chandigarh, the city where she was born, and where the influence of her architect parents immersed her in conversations about form, structure, and negative space. “My designs are very geometric, very brutalist-inspired. Straight lines, clean, minimal, yet bold in the shape they’ve taken instead of the adornments on them.” The minimalist energy she absorbed as a student in New York layered onto Chandigarh’s foundational geometry.
Her gemstone use follows the same logic. “There hasn’t been enough play with gemstones,” she says. Where traditional luxury jewellery uses stones to signal status and accumulate value, Meghna uses them to complete forms and add conceptual weight that has nothing to do with carat calculations. Her modus operandi — luxury materials liberated from luxury’s visual vocabulary — addresses a specific market gap. Younger buyers want precious, but they define it differently. For them, value comes from the equation: design integrity multiplied by personal meaning. They want jewellery that works with their actual lives: the office, the gallery opening, the family dinner. Pieces that speak to cultural fluency without performing ethnicity, and don’t announce ‘Indian jewellery’ to classmates in London or colleagues in New York, yet still carry one’s identity.
When Meghna brought her designs to the karigars of Jaipur, she expected resistance. Instead, she found welcoming collaboration. “There’s nothing as beautiful as Indian karigari and there’s nothing they cannot do,” she insists, pushing against the city’s predictable royal heritage narrative. “The Jaipur I know is a crazy innovation hub where people are beautifully skilled.” The traditional motifs they’ve crafted for decades with their intricate filigree and detailed work, actually requires more handwork than her minimal geometric forms. “But I don’t think anybody else is bringing this new design exposure to them,” she says.
Earth is Square and Kitthh Kitthh — crafted in 92.5 silver, finished in 22 k micron gold
The market is responding. During the Diwali buying rush, Maison Megh’s first art object — a silver diya with strategic gemstone placement — sold unexpectedly well. “People are looking for freshness, but they’re more comfortable with freshness that has some type of enduring value, and silver is that sweet spot,” she shares. Her target customer is someone who understands that commitment to jewellery doesn’t require traditional heritage-value pieces.
She calls Maison Megh an “experimental silver fashion house,” not a jewellery brand — because the work is just beginning.
Silver, it turns out, wasn’t compromise. It expressed the courage to choose based on emotional resonance rather than market expectation and to honour investment culture while redefining what it means. Meghna’s early bet now reads as foresight. The sweet spot she identified — precious enough for serious long-term worth and flexible enough for radical reimagining — is precisely where a generation is choosing to place its values. The locked cupboard still holds gold. But increasingly, what people actually wear comes from the drawer. Silver never needed to become gold; it just needed someone confident enough to say so.
Words by Rhea Sinha
Image Courtesy Maison Megh and Bhavya Ahuja
