By the time the sky darkened over the Jaipur Centre for Art, the courtyard had begun to glow. Overhead, stars. Underfoot, centuries of stone. At the centre of it all stood Passing the Light, a monumental installation by artist Doyel Joshi, made of 4,500 hand-sculpted terracotta elements. Each is inspired by the humble diya, yet shaped in the hypnotic scale pattern of Bvlgari's Serpenti motif.
The Morning Conversation
The day began with a panel discussion bringing together Stephane Larher, Managing Director, Bvlgari Middle East, Africa & India; author and columnist Twinkle Khanna; artist Doyel Joshi; and Noelle Kadar, co-founder of the Jaipur Centre for Art. The conversation started from marking the first ever global Diwali campaign for Bvlgari and went into more deeper narratives of pushing traditon and light forward.
The conversation moved between art, culture and commerce, and kept returning to one idea: that art is a bridge. Colour came up as a shared language, and so did transmission, the way knowledge, craft and memory pass from one pair of hands to the next. Underneath it all was a simple, generous thought…celebration is a narrative meant to bring people together.
There was news, too. Passing the Light is part of Bvlgari’s first-ever Diwali campaign, a 360-degree effort that pairs tradition with modernity. Starting in Jaipur, the artwork will travel, carrying the story with it. Noyel Kadar spoke about the smell of mud, ‘this intangible thing that immediately takes you home.’ It is a memory most of us carry without naming, and it had quietly shaped the project. Doyel had her own realisation mid-panel. ‘Subconsciously, because we were working with this material, we ended up naming our son Baarish,’ she told me, laughing. She was in the middle of the project when her son arrived, and the smell of earth after rain had settled into her life long before she noticed.
The installation was made with the kumhar community and local craftswomen, who shaped each piece through a dedicated social enterprise. Doyel is firm about the material's place in all this. ‘Terracotta is not a humble material. It is a universal one,’ she says. ‘A diya belongs to the street and to the palace equally.’
Light on Clay
Night is when the work came alive. Flames flickered across the tiles, and their glow was caught and thrown back by the curved, scaled surfaces, so the light seemed to travel from one piece to the next. Shadows shifted across the courtyard walls. No single element dominated. It was the whole that held you. This is the modularity Doyel had described to me. She saw it too in the Bvlgari jewellery she wore: ‘Something that is hard, but yet finding movement.’ Each piece is singular, then joined to the next. ‘The same way, each brick interlocks with each other, but it can take new shapes. It depends on the way that we lay it together.’
What it Took
Behind the beauty was real difficulty. Terracotta, Doyel says, is ‘a science, but it's also a relationship with the material.’ Humidity, temperature and a moment of distraction can all change the outcome. ‘When you fire it, when you shape it, it can collapse. We failed quite a lot.’ Then, with some tenderness, ‘It has its own life. You have to respect it.’ For her, the failures became part of the feeling the work carries. ‘You can only make someone else feel what you truly are feeling. You can't fake that.’
Where Clay Meets Gold
Asked where her sensibility meets Bvlgari's, Doyel pointed to ‘the curiosity of making’, how to push a material and an emotion towards something contemporary that still respects where it comes from. The collaboration, she says, has been ‘a conversation between two very different histories of making, one shaped in clay, the other in gold, that speak, in the end, the same language of transmission.’ Bvlgari CEO Laura Burdese framed it as a philosophy of luxury, ‘It is about giving meaning to what we inherit.’ Standing in that courtyard, under the stars, with the light passing from one tile to the next, I understood what she meant. Diwali is about a flame handed from one hand to another. That night, in clay and in gold, it was handed to all of us.
Words Hansika Lohani
Date 13.10.2026
