Patiala Necklace shimmers at London’s V&A

After drawing more than 250,000 visitors in just five months, the star of the new Cartier exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) remains the Patiala Necklace, a piece so audacious that even in reproduction it halts visitors mid-stride. Created in 1928 for Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala, it shimmers in its case with nearly 3,000 diamonds, including the legendary 234-carat De Beers stone. No royal court in Europe could rival its splendour then, and none can now.

The exhibition opened in April and runs until November 16. By all accounts, it is the most popular jewellery show in the museum’s history, dwarfing the 39,148 who attended the museum’s ‘Fabergé in London: Romance to Revolution’ exhibition in 2021–22. In recent years, the V&A has staged only three other dedicated jewellery exhibitions: ‘Pearls’ (2013–14), ‘Bejewelled Treasures: The Al Thani Collection’ (2015–16), and ‘Fabergé in London’ (2021–22). Unlike those earlier shows, which did not have official visitor totals published, the overwhelming demand for Cartier has made its record-breaking scale impossible to ignore.

September weekends sold out by mid-August, and demand for October and November slots is equally intense.

Tickets, priced at £27 on weekdays (about Rs 3,230) and £29 on weekends (about Rs 3,470), continue to vanish within hours of release.

Bhupinder Singh himself was no ordinary prince. He travelled in Europe in his private train, played polo with British aristocrats, and was renowned for his flamboyance. Photographs show him dripping with jewels at official functions, a ruler who wore diamonds as armour in a colonial world that had stripped him of real political power. The Patiala Necklace was his ultimate statement, extravagant, impossible to ignore, and designed to remind the Raj that Indian princes still commanded wealth beyond the imagination of their imperial overlords.

The fate of that necklace is almost as dramatic as its creation. Commissioned by Bhupinder Singh in 1928, it passed to his son Yadavindra Singh in 1938 and was still intact in 1954, as a film shown at the V&A confirms him wearing it on his 40th birthday. In the decades that followed, however, the jewel quietly vanished from Patiala. Its platinum framework resurfaced in a London shop in 1998, stripped of its great diamonds and Burmese rubies. Cartier restored it in 2002, setting replicas in place of the missing stones. The version on display today is part original, part reproduction — dazzling still, but also a ghost of India’s lost opulence, its most precious jewels long since scattered.

His splendour, however, rested on a much older and unmistakably Indian story. For centuries, India was the world’s only source of diamonds. The Golconda mines of the Deccan produced stones that became global legends: the Kohinoor, the Hope Diamond, and countless others that filled Mughal treasuries before passing into European hands. Only in the 18th century did Brazil and later South Africa begin to challenge India’s monopoly.

That deep history hums beneath the Cartier display. Visitors marvelling at the Patiala Necklace are also staring at the afterlife of India’s geology, artistry, and lost sovereignty.

The necklace is only one example of Cartier’s long courtship of Indian princes. The Maharajas of Nawanagar, Kapurthala, Baroda and Indore stride through the exhibition in archive photographs, resplendent in silks and jewels. They carried trunks of gems to Paris, including Golconda diamonds, Colombian emeralds and Burmese rubies, which Cartier recast in modern western forms.

Those transformations were breathtaking. Ancient Mughal stones were recut, turban ornaments turned into tiaras, throne jewels transformed into necklaces. The effect remains dazzling. Yet beneath the sparkle lies a sharper truth: Indian rulers, stripped of authority by the Raj, turned to jewellery as their last theatre of sovereignty. Their bodies became their thrones; their ornaments, their proclamations.

Cartier’s designers did not only profit from Indian stones. They borrowed Indian design itself. The famous tutti frutti style — carved emeralds, rubies, and sapphires set in exuberant clusters — came directly from Mughal ateliers in Jaipur and Delhi.

What once adorned Indian courts re-emerged in Paris as global chic, marketed as modern but rooted in centuries of Indian artistry.

Even the journey of the gems tells a fractured story. Cartier’s records trace how Golconda diamonds were split, reset and scattered into multiple modern jewels. Each fragment sparkles still, but the whole has been lost, treasures dismantled to feed European appetites. The exhibition celebrates craftsmanship; Indian viewers may also see cultural dismemberment.

The contrasts are jarring. As Cartier’s Maharaja commissions multiplied in Paris, peasants rioted in British-controlled India against famine, taxation and forced labour. Gandhi’s spinning wheel offered one vision of India; the Patiala Necklace offered another. Luxury and deprivation stood side by side.

That paradox lingers in the galleries today. Jewels that dazzle in the glass cases are also witness to colonial imbalance, a world where Indian rulers poured fortunes into Parisian luxury while their subjects fought for freedom.

The echoes reach into the present. In today’s India, no Bollywood wedding or awards night is complete without dazzling jewels. What once signalled a Maharaja’s splendour would now be the ultimate red-carpet prize. Cinema has, in a sense, inherited the glamour once monopolised by princes: the stage is different, but the jewels play the same role of spectacle and dominance.

This raises questions the exhibition does not ask. Should treasures like the Patiala Necklace, even in reconstructed form, sit in London rather than Punjab? Should Mughal stones recut for western clients be remembered as lost heritage? These doubts hover in the galleries even if the labels remain silent.

Cartier itself now courts Indian buyers directly, with boutiques in Delhi and Mumbai. The circle is complete: what once left India in trunks for Paris returns as luxury marketed back to its source.

The exhibition is not only about India. Grace Kelly’s engagement ring, Maria Félix’s serpent necklace, and Queen Elizabeth II’s pink diamond brooch also feature. But the Indian presence is unusually strong. Without Golconda’s mines, Mughal artistry and Maharaja patronage, Cartier’s rise would look far less glittering.

Which is why the Patiala Necklace, gleaming under the gallery lights, feels like the show’s true heart. It is both spectacle and symbol, a jewel that embodies the brilliance of Indian gems and the contradictions of colonial history. For India, the show is also a reminder of treasures long scattered across the world, now briefly reunited under one roof in London.

— The writer is the London correspondent of The Tribune