The rocks of the Raj

Their clients number most of the world’s royal dynasties. Crown princes from Japan, Sweden and Morocco and sheikhs from the Gulf are all Kasliwal customers. Charles orders his crested cufflinks from them, and for her marriage to him Camilla wore earrings made by the family. When the Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal took over Versailles two years ago for his daughter’s wedding, he called on the brothers. The groom’s jewellery, including sarpech and diamond buttons, was fashioned by workers whose methods have not changed since Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal in memory of his beloved Mumtaz in the 17th century.

Dr Amin Jaffer, a curator in the Asian department at the Victoria and Albert Museum, says that such artistry reminds us of the wealth and majesty of the Indian potentates. Both the Mogul emperors who dominated the subcontinent for 300 years and the princely rulers of the 19th and 20th centuries were exacting – and greedy – customers. “There was a desire for conspicuous display,” he says. “The aesthetic was for ropes of precious stones and multiple colours. There was no sense that it was worn with discretion. It was worn with abandon.” That’s curator-speak for bling. The author of a new book, Made for Maharajas, Jaffer explains that, according to Indian tradition, gems serve as talismans corresponding to the planets. Rubies (the sun) and pearls (the moon) are particularly auspicious. So when rulers sought to magnify their power, they vied for the finest stones and appointed the most skilful craftsmen in the land.

Such are the Kasliwals. The windows of Chaumet and Boucheron in Paris, or Tiffany and Harry Winston in New York, are filled with similar creations. What gives the brothers added allure is their court tradition, although, unlike Cartier and Fabergé, they have worked in relative obscurity. For nine generations this family business has enjoyed a relationship with the very richest patrons. In a world where fashion houses proudly display the legend “Since 1972”, it is rather impressive to let slip that your family worked for descendants of Tamerlane the Great and Genghis Khan. One Fodor guidebook noted that the Kasliwals’ royal clientele “makes Cartier seem third-rate”. Genghis and his horde didn’t stop to sign the visitors’ book, but plenty of later clients did, among them Lord and Lady Mountbatten, Eleanor Roosevelt and Jackie Kennedy. Norman Parkinson photographed their wares in a famous shoot in the 1950s. When Diana, Princess of Wales visited in 1992, she came away with a gift of emerald and diamond earrings.

Bling or not, it is history that brings the brothers to the West. They are at work on a show for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, to mark the opening of its new Islamic galleries in 2008. To coincide with this year’s Hatshepsut exhibition at the Met, the Gem Palace produced an historically accurate Egyptian collection, using techniques that are centuries old.

In its Jaipur workshop, stones are polished by hand by men known as lapidaries. Eschewing modern enhancement, they do not “fire” the gems to deepen their colour. “Graders” sit at benches, tweezers in hand, sorting rubies from Burma, tourmalines from Madagascar and aquamarines from Brazil. In other rooms craftsmen heat gold filigree to set stones, and enamellers work with molten glass to layer
their brilliant hues. As Harry Fane, a British jewellery expert who has helped bring the show to Britain, says, “Their technology is medieval. I love that sense of continuity.”

Many jobs are passed from father to son, and more than 3,000 people are employed in sites across the city. Despite its renown, there is no grand frontage to the Gem Palace shop. You find it by asking the way to the best lassi (yogurt drink) shop in the area, then turning right. There is nothing in the window, no hint of the treasures within. Inside, ropes of precious stones are strewn on counters. Emeralds worth millions lie in paper wrappers. The effect is not so much Aladdin’s cave as old-fashioned sweet shop. There are rubies the size of gobstoppers, peridots like translucent wine gums, diamonds like lollipops.

A request to see something old is met with Munnu Kasliwal asking “Will this do?” as he pulls out a chest to reveal a child’s enamelled necklace and a pair of bracelets worn by the young Mogul emperor Jahangir, who ruled from 1605 to 1627. From a cupboard emerges a diamond fringe necklace made for a Hapsburg princess to attend the Congress of Vienna in 1815. In a cabinet upstairs is Shah Jahan’s jade drinking cup.

Some of the treasures from Jaipur being shown in London, both antique and modern, will be for sale. The necklace of 305 rose-cut diamonds, for instance, will cost £200,000. But many exhibits, such as an exquisitely enamelled gold plate made for a 19th-century ruler, will remain with the family. The Kasliwals have borrowed many pieces back from clients to show in London.

Some of the gems coming to the exhibition will be those that hard-up princes, who once gold-plated their cars and had diamond collars for their pets, had to hawk when they were stripped of their revenues in the 1970s. As Fane reminds us, when it comes to liquid assets, jewels are the next best thing to cash, “Many a Russian grand duke and Indian prince got out of trouble by selling his heirlooms. Hawking a diamond or two could buy him a passport to safety.”

With all these heirlooms whizzing about, you might think security would be a worry. But the brothers remain sanguine. The Jaipur showroom is guarded by a man with all the brawn of Mahatma Gandhi. “Indians are very superstitious about gems,” explains Munnu Kasliwal. “If anyone buys a stolen stone or acquires it wrongly, it will curse them. We have a saying, ‘Someone who steals gems will lose his eyesight.’”

Certainly there will be plenty to covet. But it would be wrong to visit Somerset House merely to gawp. The exhibition reminds us of our past love affair with India, its role as a former colony and its current political transformation. Its trade in old and new jewellery reaps millions for its coffers. At the centre of a global industry, last year India imported $83m worth of gemstones, such as sapphires from Sri Lanka and garnets from Africa, and exported $193m worth of finished stones. Fifty-five per cent of the world’s diamond supply is processed in India and traded through Mumbai. Until the discovery of diamonds in Russia and Africa in the 19th century, India was the only source in the world. Jaipur, with its precious stone and gold markets, is still the world capital of coloured gems. It was greed for such gems, as well as spices, that took the first Europeans to India in the 15th century.

Nobody brings the tale of these jewels to life better than the beautiful woman in the portrait at the Rambagh Palace who will open the Somerset House exhibition. The story of Ayesha, on whom so many riches were lavished, is both ancient and modern. It tells of a vanished world and that which has replaced it. In her lifetime she has seen the subcontinent move from feudalism to democracy. Her father may have been a prince with absolute power, but she grew up to espouse everything modern. In the 1930s she shocked society by wearing trousers, playing tennis and driving a sports car. She helped to abolish purdah in Rajasthan and to champion women’s education. She even asked the people who were once her subjects to elect her to parliament. And along the way, she wore a lot of rocks. As Lucy Moore, the historian who tells the story of the family in her book Maharanis, says, nobody represents “high-voltage glamour” better than Ayesha. Born in Cooch Behar, in east India, Princess Ayesha grew up to marry India’s most dashing prince, Man Singh II, the polo-playing Maharaja of Jaipur, known to everyone as “Jai”. Lord Mountbatten, India’s last viceroy, was a close friend. “I cannot think of any more striking and attractive couple than Jai and Ayesha when they married,” he once remarked. When they visited Britain after the war, they lit up a monochrome world where food and petrol were still rationed. Reporters would camp outside their house to report their parties in gossip columns. Prince Philip played polo against Jai, Nikita Khrushchev went to stay, and the Kennedys invited them to the White House. JFK apologised for not being more attentive: he was in the middle of the Cuban missile crisis.

Extravagance and excess were in the couple’s genes. When an ancestor of Ayesha’s married the Maharaja of Baroda in 1885, his elephant bore a jewel-encrusted howdah of solid gold. It required 24 men to hoist it onto the animal’s back. As Amin Jaffer reminds us, “Princes didn’t practise restraint.” Another story relates how Ayesha’s mother, herself a glamour girl, bewitched people in the casino at Le Touquet in the 1920s. At the roulette table her talisman was her pet tortoise, his back laden with strips of emeralds, diamonds and rubies. Rumoured to have had an affair with the raffish Prince of Wales, the Maharani of Cooch Behar had a reputation so racy that unkind tongues called her the “Maharani of Couche Partout”.

It was inevitable that, with independence in 1947 and the rise of the socialist Congress party, this rarefied world should come to an end.

But even India’s princes, who had negotiated with Mountbatten to keep their titles and income, were shocked at the speed of their
loss of privileges. Mrs Gandhi declared war on them when she was prime minister, eventually stripping them of their state revenues in the 1970s.

By then Jai had leased the Rambagh Palace to a hotel company and sold his private plane. He surrendered goods and property worth £15m to the state; other rulers did the same, selling off their gems in the process. Ayesha has given the diamond drops to her granddaughter, but the rest of her estate is at the centre of a long-running legal wrangle between family factions.

Jai died, as he would have wished, on the polo field in 1970. Ayesha served as a member of parliament before retiring to a house in the grounds of the Rambagh where she still lives.

When she closes her eyes, as she recounts in her autobiography, A Princess Remembers, her mind fills with memories like so many sepia photographs. Of shooting her first panther aged 12, of falling asleep to the sound of monsoon rains, and of riding home on the back of an elephant at dusk. She also dreams of being the young woman in the portrait. Her husband is alive again and everything is as it was. She can still feel the rubies and pearls at her throat.

Treasures from the Gem Palace is at Somerset House, London from September 28 to October 22. Tel: 020 7420 9400. Made for Maharajas, by Amin Jaffer, is published in October by New Holland. Deirdre Fernand travelled to Rajasthan courtesy of British Airways and Greaves Travel (tel: 0870 850 2497; www.greavesindia.com), staying at the Rambagh Palace Taj Hotel (tel: 0800 282 699; www.tajhotels.com)