When Sawai Jai Singh II laid out Jaipur in the eighteenth century, he drew artisans to it from across the country, and among them came the enamellers. In a land of arid plains and pale stone, colour has always been a kind of defiance, from the rose washed walls of the old city to the leheriya of a festival turban. It is little wonder that meenakari, the art of fixing brilliant colour onto gold, found its truest home here. Jaipur did not merely adopt the craft. It became its capital.

For all its history, meenakari had never been given a house of its own. Its finest examples lay scattered in private collections and foreign museums, admired but rarely gathered. The Museum of Meenakari Heritage, the first private museum in India devoted to a local heritage craft, was created to change that. Set within Shekhawat Haveli, across 3,000 square feet near Jaipur's historic walled city, it brings together 120 faithful reproductions and 60 original creations by Sunita Shekhawat, drawn from a study of more than 300 archival images held by over fifteen of the world's leading institutions, among them the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Al Thani Collection, and the Aga Khan Museum. Curated by the jewellery historian Dr. Usha R. Balakrishnan, the collection charts the craft's long journey and, at last, brings it home.