Geometrics in Indian Mosaic

 

QUESTION: Recently, as I was browsing the tables at a local garage sale, I came across a unique box covered with tiny bits of stone in intricate geometric patterns. I asked the homeowner if they knew anything about it, but she said she bought it several years ago at another yard sale. I decided to buy the box but I can’t find anything about it. What can you tell me about this box?

ANSWER: Your box is an example of a Sadeli Mosaic, a type of decoration of repeating geometric patterns on a variety of boxes, card cases, and chess boards produced in India since the 16th century. Becoming popular in the 19th century, it’s a type of micro mosaic. Since Bombay (now Mumbai) became a center of making them, they became known as Bombay boxes.

Archaeologists believe the ancient art of Sadeli Mosaic first appeared in Shiraz in Persia by way of Sind to Bombay, a long time before Indian boxes appeared. The designs on early boxes look deceptively simple. They emerged from a culture which had mastered geometry and understood how to generate a pattern from a set number of points. The patterns are so harmoniously combined that their incredible complexity isn’t immediately apparent to the viewer.

While the technique may at first seem exquisitely complex, it’s relatively simple. Nevertheless, it required a great deal of skill and patience.

The first step in creating a Sadeli mosaic was to prepare thin rods by scraping lengths of ivory, bone or wood into the desired shape, usually triangular. Artisans then glued these long thin rods together with animal glue, then sliced them transversely to form a repeat pattern. To get variety and contrast, they used woods like ebony and rosewood, along with natural and green-stained bone and ivory. Often they mixed in circular shaped rods of silver, pewter or tin. Finally, they glued the slices onto the surface of a wooden box, often made of sandalwood. Craftsmen then scraped the surface of the slices to level slight variations. To achieve variations of patterns, they combined the materials in different ways.

Persian and Indian makers of this exquisite decorative technique displayed an understanding of the qualities of the different materials they used. They combined substances, which could expand and contract according to atmospheric conditions with others which were hard and unyielding. The result was a sharp definition of the lines and patterns which made up the whole design.

Beginning in the early part of the 18th century, Indian artisans made what came to be known as Anglo-Indian boxes for the English residents living in India, who eventually brought or sent them back to England. At the beginning of the 19th century, India began exporting these boxes commercially, although not in any significant numbers until the 1850s. People valued them so highly that manufacturers of biscuit tins copied the designs on them in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Anglo-Indian boxes fall into four groups: Rosewood or ebony boxes inlaid with ivory; sandalwood boxes veneered in ivory, tortoiseshell, horn, quills or a combination of these materials; sandalwood boxes covered with Sadeli mosaic; and carved boxes often combined with Sadeli mosaic.

The first two categories came from Vizagapatam in East India while the last two came from Bombay in West India.

English traders discovered the rich woods and intricate workmanship of Indian artisans, so colonial government officials began to recognize the work of the Indian artists and craftsmen as a source for satisfying the need for furniture and boxes, which would both serve to enhance English households in India. This gave rise to the cabinetmaking workshops in Vizagapatam between Calcutta and Madras.

Craftsmen made the first boxes to be decorated with Sadeli Mosaic of rosewood or ebony with ivory, incised to give further definition to the decoration, directly inlaid into the wood. The shape of the early boxes was either sloping at the front with a flatter section at the back, reminiscent of English writing slopes, or rectangular. Artisans inlaid the borders with stylized floral scrolls and the centers with a single floral motif following a circular or oval symmetrical or asymmetrical pattern. The edging was of ivory pinned with ivory pins, or a combination of ivory and wood. Both ornamental and protective, both helped protect the end grain against the weather.

The style of the ornamentation on the early boxes was formal yet flowing and robust, a perfect compliment to the strength and grain of the rosewoods. The boxes often had silver escutcheons and drop handles. Indian artisans made this type of box up to the 1750s.

They also made ivory inlaid boxes in more conventional English shapes, such as writing, document, and jewelry boxes later in the 18th and 19th centuries. The designs by this time had moved on to covering more of the box in an integrated pattern or with a simple edge decoration with a small central motif.

In the early boxes, which date from the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, there are large panels of mosaic covering the tops and sides. It took incredible skill to cover such large areas without any wavering of the pattern. To further enhance the symmetry of these boxes, artisans impeccably matched the corners and where the sides joined the bottom.

To meet the demand, additional Indian workshops began making Sadeli Mosaic boxes in the latter part of the 19th century. The accuracy of execution and the sharpness of design suffered, however, although boxes from this period are pretty and easier to find.

The majority of the boxes found in the antiques market today are from the early to mid 19th century. By the 1820s, Indian craftsmen covered few boxes completely in Sadeli Mosaic, using it  more sparingly combined with other materials, mainly ivory. Latter sandalwood boxes, veneered in ivory, had circles, diamonds or bands of mosaic inserted as further decoration. 

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about "The Roaring Twenties" in the 2025 Spring Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

Communicating with the Dearly Departed

QUESTION: I recently saw a Ouija Board for sale at a Saturday flea market at my local fire company. It brought back a lot of pleasant memories. When I was a kid, one of my friends got a Ouija Board.  Every Saturday afternoon, we would play with it for hours, asking it questions about life and potential relationships. I realize it was only a toy, but can you tell me how Ouija Boards originated and how come they became so popular?

ANSWER: Although Ouija Boards gained popularity from the 1960s to the 1980s, they actually originated in 1890 during the Age of Spiritualism.

The year was 1890 and the age of Spiritualism was in full swing. Founded on the belief that people could communicate with the dearly departed, the movement often depended on "mediums" who fell into a trance and spoke for the dead, or unconsciously wielded pens or pencils to spell out messages termed called "automatic" writings. Ordinary people gathered around the kitchen table and invited the disembodied to rock it to spell out coded messages, or employed a "dial plate" imprinted with numbers and letters and fitted with a free-floating pointing device a spirit might manipulate to deliver a message from the other side.

But each of these conduits to the Netherworld had its limitations. Tables were cumbersome, mediums were difficult to find, and automatic writing was as impossible to read as a doctor's prescription. Then a popular refinement to automatic writing called the “planchette"—French for "little plank"—came into being. This palm-sized, heart-shaped piece of wood supported by three wheeled casters, usually made of bone, had a pointed end with a hole in which a person could insert a pencil. This allowed the device to glide over a piece of paper leaving a trail of legible notes from the dearly departed.

In 1886, an article appeared from the new Associated Press about the “talking board,” a new phenomenon taking over the spiritualists’ camps in Ohio, with letters, numbers and a planchette-like device to point to them. Charles Kennard of Baltimore, Maryland read it and sensed there was money to be made. In 1890, he gathered together a group of four other investors—including Elijah Bond, a local attorney, and Colonel Washington Bowie, a surveyor—to start the Kennard Novelty Company to exclusively make and market these new talking boards. None of the men were spiritualists, but they knew a great business opportunity.

The first "talking board" produced by the Kennard Novelty Company would not only field answers from the Other Side, but also become the canvas for a unique form of American pop art for the next 70 years. Regardless of being named after a fabled Moroccan city spelled "Oujda" or "Oujida" or maybe from the French and German words for yes and no, "oui".and ja," its title became "Ouija" in English. Over time, the boards themselves became pure Americana.

By 1892, the Kennard Novelty Company had seven factories—two in Baltimore, two in New York, two in Chicago, and one in London. And by 1893, the other two original investors kicked Kennard and Bond out. By this time, William Fuld, who started as a worker a the new company and rose to become foreman and a stockholder, was running the company. In 1897, Bowie leased the rights to manufacture the Ouija board to William and his brother Isaac.

Fuld ran the company for the next 35 years, and it was his Ouija Board that exists in one form or another today. After he died from a fall in 1921, his children took over the business, manufacturing the family boards until 1966 when they sold out to Parker Brothers.

Almost before the ink could dry on Kennard's original patent, shops across the country began turning out almost exact copies of his talking board with enough variation to satisfy the law. Others simply borrowed the basic design elements of the original and added graphics that ranged from cartoon-like to grandiose. Through the 1960s hundreds of companies manufactured talking boards, their designs often reflecting the times.

Popular board themes included the Middle East, Egypt and the Zodiac, but board makers placed all sorts of emblems and icons on their creations. There was a Mitchie Manitou board that celebrated an arcane spirit of the Algonquin Indians, a Halloween board with witches, an Age of Aquarius board in the 1960s, and a New Age board in the 1970s. Artistry aside, the appeal of the talking board remained its dual nature as a parlor game, a toy, and a device for communicating with the dearly departed.

As a parlor game the talking board was the hula-hoop of its time. The instructions on the back of most boards said that two persons—ideally of the opposite sex—were to sit across from each other in a quiet, darkened room, supporting the board between them on their knees, and hope for something magical. And for some, that undoubtedly happened.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Article section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the other 18,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about western antiques in the special 2019 Winter Edition, "The Old West," online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques & More Collection on Facebook.