This huqqa base, with irises and other flowers, would have originally been fitted with a long stem supporting a brazier and a pipe through which the smoker would have inhaled. Many of the known examples of huqqa bases from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were made in the Deccan and decorated with the type of metal inlay known as bidri, in which the base metal of the object is darkened through a chemical process in order to highlight the inlaid metal of the ornament.