A women’s day news report about Renuka Chowdhury’s “empowerment bangles”  has Rimi B Chatterjee musing on bangles and their cultural significance.

If women are socialised to see certain kinds of jewelry in certain ways, so are men. Indian dance and drama have turned the business of a woman putting on her jewelry into an art form: shringar. Men find chains and bars deeply erotic; I’m not saying anything new here. But the bangle exists in an uneasy no-man’s land between the sinister meaning of incarceration and the erotic meaning of a deliberate (and deliberately sexy) handicap. Payels and necklaces also have their erotic charge and innumerable filmi village maidens have lost their anklets in the bazaar and taken half an hour to sing about it with suggestive gestures. The payel does not handicap, but it does advertise one’s whereabouts: it’s impossible to sneak around up to no good if every step you take sounds like an inebriated brass band falling off a truck.