Indian Nose Jewellery Names: Nath, Nathni, Laung, Phuli, Bulaak

Nath Does Not Mean Lord

Start with the word everyone thinks they know.

You will read, in a great many places, that nath comes from nāth, meaning lord or master, and that the bride wearing one signals her husband’s authority. It is a tidy story, and it is the wrong word.

The ornament word descends from a Prakrit term for the rope passed through the nose of a draught ox. The old Sanskrit dictionaries give exactly that sense; the Hindi dictionaries still carry both meanings in one entry, nose-ring and nose-rope; and the Marathi ones give a ring worn in the nose. Nāth, meaning lord, is a separate word that happens to sound the same.

So the nath is named after the ring in an animal’s nose. That is a harder origin than the romantic one, and it is the one the evidence supports.

What Each Word Actually Denotes

Most of the confusion in this subject comes from treating a dozen words as a dozen objects. Several of them are the same object under a regional name, and two or three are not objects at all.

Nathni, nathuni, nathiya, nathuri. A small nath. That is the whole of it — the Hindi dictionaries define nathnī simply as a small nath. Nathuni is the eastern form of the same diminutive, nathuri the Rajasthani one. Not a separate piece.

Laung. A nostril stud, and the word means clove — the dried flower bud, after its shape. This is one of the rare cases where the obvious etymology is also the correct one, and the dictionaries carry both senses in a single entry. In Punjab it is described precisely: a small stud let into the flesh of the nostril, usually gold, usually with a pearl or a turquoise on it.

Phul, phuli. Flower, and so a flower-shaped stud. The eastern cousin is more transparent still: Bengali and Assamese nakphul, literally nose-flower, which is the everyday word there for a nose pin.

But Punjab distinguishes what Hindi merges. There, laung is the stud and phuli is something else — a small ring carrying a single stone as a pendant. Two words used interchangeably in one region and carefully separated in another. This happens throughout the vocabulary, and it is the main reason the state-by-state lists on the internet contradict each other.

Koka. The everyday Punjabi word for the stud. Worth being honest about this one: it is in every second Punjabi song and in no standard dictionary. It is genuine spoken usage that the lexicographers did not record. A survey of one museum’s collection lists it, probably transcribed as kaka, as a small nose pin worn from childhood. You will also see it claimed as a large hoop covering the cheek; that reading contradicts everything else and can be set aside.

Besar, besari. A gemmed nose ornament, generally a stud rather than a hoop. This is the least stable word on the list geographically — it is attested in Kannada, Telugu and Tamil, in Bengali, in Himachal Pradesh and in Rajasthan. And it does not denote the same object in all of them. The Himachali besar is a substantial crescent piece; the southern besari is small. Same word, materially different things.

Mukkuthi, mookuthi, mūkkutti. The Tamil and Malayalam nostril stud. Mūkku is nose, so the word means, plainly, nose-piece. The Tamil lexicons define it as a nose jewel worn by women, and one glossary renders it as the nose-screw, which is the modern object exactly. It carries the oldest hard attestation of anything here: a 1909 ethnography of southern communities records a gold mukkuthi as indispensable, with the nose pierced for it on the fifth day of the marriage rites.

Nolok. Bengali and Assamese, a hanging drop. Very widely described online as the Bengali septum piece, and its form is consistent with that, but we could not confirm it from a dictionary. Treat the septum reading as probable rather than settled — which is more than most articles on this subject will tell you.

Nostril or Septum: Where Bulaak Belongs

Here is the distinction that most writing on Indian nose jewellery gets wrong, and it is not a subtle one. These ornaments do not all go through the same hole.

Almost everything above is worn in the nostril — nath, laung, phuli, koka, besar, mukkuthi.

Bulaak is the septum piece. It hangs from a piercing through the wall between the nostrils, typically as a crescent or an inverted hook with a pendant falling over the upper lip. The Kannada dictionaries put it beyond argument: an ornament worn in between the nostrils. Museum collections catalogue a run of them from Himachal, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan and Lucknow, all made for septum wear — one is four and a half centimetres long, gold with lac, pearls and green glass, on a septum ring sixteen millimetres across.

And the southern bullakku or pullakku is the same word, not a different ornament. Tamil has no separate letter for the b sound, so the same word romanises two ways depending on where it falls. In temple jewellery the set is sold as naththu plus bullakku — one in the nostril, one in the septum.

Two honest exceptions. In Punjabi usage a bulak can be a drop hung from the nostril or from a nath rather than a septum piece. And in Himachal, nathni attaches to the septum ornament rather than to the small nath — the one place where that word crosses over.

The Forms Themselves

Maharashtra

The Maharashtrian nath is not a circle, and that is the first thing to know about it. It is an elongated asymmetric curve — cashew, or paisley, depending on who is describing it — built on gold wire strung with small pearls in two graduated arcs that meet at a point, with a coloured stone set at the head. It sweeps out and down across the cheek rather than sitting flat against the nostril.

The pearls matter. Traditionally they were Basra pearls: small, natural, slightly irregular pearls from the Persian Gulf. The historic Persian Gulf pearl fisheries that supplied them have long since disappeared as a commercial source, so modern naths use cultured or imitation pearls. If you are ever shown an heirloom and asked to tell it from a new piece, that is where to look.

Two named styles are worth knowing. The Brahmani is the smaller and older-looking — pearls, gold, a single red stone, the classic paisley. The Peshwai is larger and more elaborate, often set with diamonds, and takes its name from the eighteenth-century Peshwa court. Beyond those two, the names multiply into jewellers’ catalogue vocabulary and stop meaning anything consistent between shops.

Rajasthan

The Rajasthani nath is circular, large — commonly five to eight centimetres — and worked in kundan and meenakari with pearls and coloured stones. It is heavier and more three-dimensional than the Bengali hoop.

Because of that weight, it is not carried by the nostril alone. A fine chain runs from the nath back to the ear, hooked over it or pinned into the hair above it depending on the piece, and in Rajasthan that chain has a name: sankli. There is no single canonical term for it across India — the honest answer is that regions simply use their ordinary word for chain — and any source that offers you one authoritative name for it is overreaching.

The trade has its own word, and you will meet it on price tags: sahara, from the word for support. That is what the chain does, so the name is apt. It is a seller’s term rather than a regional one, and worth knowing for that reason rather than in spite of it.

Punjab

Punjab has an unusually precise vocabulary for nose jewellery, and it distinguishes seven pieces where most lists manage two.

The nath is the large ring, ornamented on one side. The bulak is a small pendant, hung from the nostril or strung onto the nath. Latkan are the pendants that hang from a nath, and a morni is one shaped like a peacock’s spread tail. Bohr is a dangling pendant of gold pipal leaves. Then the laung, the stud, and the phuli, the small ring with its stone.

Bengal

The Bengali bridal nath is a large, thin gold hoop, plain or lightly worked, generally wider in diameter and much lighter than the Rajasthani kundan type, often with a chain to the hair. Everyday vocabulary runs to nakphul for the stud, with nakchhabi, nolok and besar alongside it.

The South

Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu each have their own words: mukkuthi and naththu, besari, bullakku, and in Telugu mukkera and mukku pudaka.

One practice is worth recording carefully, because it is real but thinly documented: in parts of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, women wore rings in both nostrils together with a bulaak at the septum. Three piercings, worn as a set. We would not present that as a pan-South-Indian norm — the sourcing does not support it — but as a regional practice it is well enough attested to mention.

Three Words That Belong Somewhere Else

These three appear on almost every list of Indian nose ornaments. None of them is one.

Chunni is a stone, not an ornament. In the trade it means a small ruby or ruby chip. A chunni nose pin is a nose pin set with a chunni — the word describes what is in it, not what it is. Lists that treat it as a type have read a materials description as an object name.

Teeka is a forehead ornament, worn on the hair parting. It is worn with a bridal nath, which is presumably how it wandered onto the wrong list.

Murthu we could not attest anywhere — not in the Tamil lexicons, not in museum records, not in any scholarly survey we consulted. By the standard used for koka above, that is not proof it does not exist, but nothing supports it either. It is most likely a corruption of muthu, meaning pearl, or of mukkuthi itself.

One more that is not a word problem but a claim problem. Kanta means thorn, and by extension a pin. It is used loosely for pin-form jewellery, but no dictionary gives it a nose-ornament sense, so it is a description rather than a name.

Why We Are Not Giving You a State-by-State Table

Almost every article on this subject ends with a neat table: one ornament per state, Kashmir here, Odisha there, Andhra something else.

Those tables are not true. They cite nothing, they copy one another, and the real distribution does not work that way. Besar alone spans the South, Bengal, Himachal and Rajasthan, not always denoting the same object. Bulaak runs from Himachal to Tamil Nadu under four spellings. Assigning one word to one state produces something clean, memorable and wrong.

The honest organising principle is the one used above: sort by the object and by where the hole is, then note which regions call it what. It is untidier, and it survives contact with an actual jewellery box.

The same caution applies to two other things you will read. That the nath is worn only by married women — not so; girls are given small ones by parents in several regions, and Punjab records a stud worn from childhood. And the elaborate taxonomies of nath styles under a dozen names: those are jewellers’ product names, applied differently from shop to shop, not a classification anyone has established.

The Vocabulary, in One Place

Which of these will actually sit on your nose is a separate question, and one of measurement rather than vocabulary. Our size guide covers it, and the style guide deals with the six ways a piece stays in.

How to wear a large nath — its weight, its chain, and what to do about both on a wedding day — is the subject of the next guide in this series, to be published soon.