Belted up

ANTIQUARY/ Determined collectors have identified a niche in belt buckles & cummerbund ornaments

IT WAS A friend who, quite unconsciously, let me on to a little-known but interesting niche among antique collectors. "Belt buckles," he said, "did you know there's a huge profit in them?"

Now, I imagine, the average bloke who sells belts and belt buckles in mall stores called Punk, or their clones on Janpath or Palika Bazar, is there to make money, so I said I wasn't in the least surprised, but it wasn't quite my league. "No, I guess not," my friend grinned, "not when the profit from a single sale is in the region of Rs 2 lakh."

My friend is a teetotaller, doesn't do drugs, and leads an otherwise harmless life, so I knew he couldn't be hallucinating. "You mean as annual turnover?" I asked. "No, I mean, per sale," he insisted.

A little more digging unravelled the dirt. A friend of my friend had shown him a buckle made of gold and encrusted with gemstones, bearing the seal of some former princely kingdom (Gwalior, he suspects) that he'd managed to acquire for a sum of Rs 4 lakh, an for which he had a buyer for Rs 6 lakh, earning himself a handsome profit merely as intermediary in a sale.

And no, it wasn't a belt buckle as he'd suspected, but the kind worn with cummerbunds over a tunic, a jewelled ornament not dissimilar to the turban ornaments preferred by the elite till the mid-last century.

A little more digging revealed that such sales are, in fact, not unusual, and this disused and ignored piece of jewellery is, these days, quite a collectible among a small set of collectors.

But by the time I got to the bottom of the trail, I'd also exhausted the market for more ordinary but nevertheless antique belt buckles, and it appears that there is a market for those as well, even though it's miniscule and, often, not specialised.

There are collectors who have a mixed approach to their madness, and among objects such as biscuit tins and matchboxes, they'll add shoe-horns and belt buckles.

"The craftsmanship in metal in the early last century used to be quite exquisite," notes one collector, "and these were all objects of great beauty." It was actually the Art-deco era (the twenties and thirties in India) that saw some smartly designed shoe-horns becoming virtually objects of art.

Perhaps they were used, but more likely they merely adorned the well-dressed gentleman's dressing room, and were as likely abandoned as tastes changed and valets disappeared, and the art of being dressed by an attendant became a nostalgic memory from recent history.

The plastic shoe-horn that replaced it is a symbol of how we have trivialised objects of utility to practical function alone. The belt buckle may not have suffered the same anomaly, but it less a work of art, though the roaring twenties did attempt to match buckle with tie-pin and cufflinks, and some of these are the objects collectors lust after.

Alas, again, there is little that can be recovered almost a century later. But then, there are just as few collectors in India, though if hand-cast metal frames and figures for belt buckles can be found, you can be sure the Net will help you locate buyers "" only, since many may be in the West, you'll have to remember that, imbecelic or not, Indian law forbids you to refrain from exporting anything over a hundred years out of the country without permission and the required approvals.

That's just as true of the cummerbund ornaments. These, of course, were objects of great beauty and greater value. Rarity has now led to an appreciation in their prices, but it would have been difficult enough to find what in any case could have been labelled a bargain because of their inherent worth.

However, it does open up an exciting field for specialisation. Even though most collectors tend not to look for the esoteric in India, it is interesting to speculate how a collection of belt buckles and ornaments might look side by side "" winking jewels in family crests next to cast-iron eagle-heads, for example. And if you begin now, you'd have early-mover advantage in an arena otherwise mostly picked off easy spoils.