Gold Multi Tea Light Holder

Three arms, three cups, one for the centre and two curling out either side, all of it covered in scrolls and leaves and little flowers pressed into the mould. The style is French, rococo they call it, mid 1700s, when everything in a rich man’s house had to look like it was melting. The finish is gold foil over resin, so it has that slightly uneven, rubbed look of old gilt rather than the flat shine of spray paint. It stands about 30 cm tall and around 25 cm across at the arms, and the base is heavy enough that three lit candles don’t make it nervous.

The cups take a standard dinner candle, the long 2 cm type. Not tealights, there is no dish for them.

Now, where this thing fits in an Indian house, because people ask. This exact shape came into India with the Europeans, but it did not stay with them. By the 1800s the nawabs of Lucknow and Murshidabad were buying French and Belgian gilt candelabras by the crate, the Calcutta zamindars filled their thakur dalans with them, and the Nizam’s palaces in Hyderabad still have rooms lined with these.

It became a raees ghar ka saamaan, a thing the old money Indian house had on the sideboard and it stayed that way long after the British left. When the cantonment bungalows in Bangalore were being cleared out in the 60s and 70s, my father’s generation in Shivaji Nagar bought whole lots of this stuff at the auctions, gilt candelabras, mirror frames, brass lamps and sold them on to families setting up new houses in Jayanagar and Malleswaram. So when you put one of these on your dining table you are not copying a European look, you are doing what a Lucknow haveli or a Kolkata rajbari did a hundred and fifty years ago.