Asian Jewellery
From the collection of
From the collection of
Peter Plant looks at two contrasting jewellery workshops in the Midlands. At Sparkhill in Birmingham a family business is working with 22 carat gold to hand make intricate Hindu creations after generations of producing jewellery in India. A few miles away in Smethwick Mrs Rama is the only female Asian goldsmith in the country and produces a very different but also intricate and beautiful product in gold and jewels for the Muslim community.
From local news to feature film, through home movies and TV documentaries, this collection showcases South Asian Britons in front of and behind the camera. The contribution of colonial troops is illuminated through the earliest newsreels, while hardhitting current affairs programmes highlight the struggles faced in the 1960s, 1970s and beyond. Public information films produced for South Asian audiences feature alongside Hindi-language films made in Britain and interviews with prominent Asian-British figures. A bold wave of British Asian filmmaking in the 1990s is represented through early works by the likes of Gurinder Chadha and Asif Kapadia.