The Kings Of Jaipur

(via Couture International Jeweler, Spring 2007) Victoria Gomelsky writes:

Motorized rickshaws, mopeds, hand-drawn carts an cows dominate the relentless traffic on Jaipur’s dusty M.I.Road, except for the block that houses the esteemed Gem Palace, where tour buses are a conspicuous and everyday presence.

The retail store—a Jaipur institution since 1852, when the maharaja who ruled the city, capital of India’s Rajasthan province, appointed Kasliwal family crown jewelers—conjures images of such fabulousness among visitors that it is now a regular stop on the tourist circuit, like the pink-honeycombed Palace of the Winds and hilltop Amber Fort. Credit goes to eighth-generation Munnu Kasliwal, the creative genius behind Gem Palace’s treasure trove, and his brothers, Sudhir and Sanjay, who manage the retail and wholesale ends of the business along with their cousins, Ajay and Pappu Kasliwal. Even the ninth generation is represented, the form of Munnu’s son, Siddarth, who recently joined the business. Under the family’s careful stewardship, Gem Palace earns as much respect from contemporary jewel-lovers as it did under the majarajas’ patronage.

“It the mother lode,” confirms a well-groomed American woman, cooing over a pair of carnelian earnings and matching ring on a sunny December afternoon. She’s a media buyer from Maryland on a two-week holiday with her husband in Rajasthan. A visit to Gem Palace was built in their itinerary, making them the latest in a long line of admirers to gawk over the gem-set wonders stocked inside its aging wooden showcases.

Few retailers can claim Jackie Onassis, Bill Clinton, Mick Jagger, Nicole Kidman, Giorgio Armani, Countess Mountbatten of Burma and Diana, Princess of Wales as fans. Then again, few retailers offer visitors an opportunity to purchase baubles in an environment that recalls an era in which jewelry was valued above all other material possessions. Located in a centuries-old Jaipur building with a central courtyard and flat-roof terraces distinguished by Mughal-style minarets, Gem Palace is a veritable museum of Rajasthani craftsmanship, from the mustard-color block prints that blanket the walls, withered and peeling with age, to the carved silver elephants and jeweled objects d’art that litter the floor beneath the showcases, themselves brimming with antique and contemporary interpretations of traditional Indian motifs.

There are spectacular villandi, or Mughal-cut, diamond necklaces, the diamonds flat as cobblestones and almost as large; traditional bell earrings known as jhoomki strung with Burmese rubies, like tiny gem-set parasols; gold cuff lotus flower bracelets laced with pink and green tourmalines; 22-karat gold and diamond rings fashioned in the shape of parakeets, with colorless diamond briolettes swinging from their gilded beaks. The range of jewels includes the eccentric (a 32-piece gold and diamond chess set, anyone?) and the imperial (a Mughal turban ornament known as sarpech is set with pink and purple spinels and is as long as child’s forearm), but there’s a healthy selection of more affordable baubles in rose quartz, moonstone and other semi precious stones, sourced as rough from the hundreds of dealers who congregate inside the walls of the old city.

What’s more, the jewelry on display at Gem Palace is breathtaking down to the details hidden from view. Following the Hindu belief that the body sees what the eyes cannot, the back of Mannu’s creations bear extraordinary detailing, including delicate filigree work, diamond accents and vivid pastoral scenes rendered in red and green enamel, a style known as kundan meena. Gem Palace is also one of the chief practitioners of an ancient Indian gold working technique called kundan, in which precious stones are set into 24-karat gold with a core of lac, a natural resin, the inlay forming a shiny ribbon around each stone.

Beyond the sensory pleasures of touring Gem Palace lies the significant intellectual reward of seeing and touching historical evidence that connects the store to its magnificent home city, founded by ruler Jai Singh in 1727. The salon’s wooden chairs, carved from Burmese teak, look like they could have supported the backside of a Mughal King, and probably did. Against the wall, a stack of 100-year old, poster-size black-and-white prints depict the annual mystic extravaganza that is the Pushkar camel fair. Ornate silver trunks lined in red velvet store historic-gem-encrusted flasks originally crafted for the Singh dynasty. Such touches lend the store an antique atmosphere that belies the whirl of activity going on upstairs and at select location around Jaipur.

“We don’t outsource anything,” says Sudhir Kasliwal, as he leads a visitor through the warren of rooms that constitute the main selling floor. “We have our workers working in their homes for pieces. But everything is done by our staff. This is one place where we do everything, right from cutting and polishing stones to setting. That’s why we can design something and don’t have to look here and there for the stones. Instead, we cut our own.”

Gem Palace employs several thousand people, all under the direction of Munnu, a 49-year old artist whose flair with gemstones is such that London’s Gilbert Collection at Somerset House assembled 250 pieces of his work for a month long exhibition last fall. “Treasures from the Gem Palace” was the brainchild of Harry Fane, an authority on Cartier who grew close to the Kasliwal family over the course of numerous research visits to India.

“The show had 7400 visitors in one day while the Tiffany show across the way attracted 600, so you can see the amount of interest that people in Europe had in us,” Sudhir says, as he walks past a shiny 1912 Mercedes parked in back of the store, one of the numerous vintage cars that make up his personal collection.

Even among the private lives of Jaipur’s citizens, the past is perpetually present. When Jai Singh built this “Pink City”, known for the dusty pink stucco walls that surround the old quarter, he invited artisans from all over the country to move here, part of his campaign to make Jaipur India’s first planned city. Then, as now, the Johari Bazaar, or jeweler’s market, teemed with gem cutters and traders bartering for the best prices on colored stones.

That foundation helped cement Jaipur’s standing as the epicenter of the gemstone trade, a reputation that continues to this day. In the 2005-2006 fiscal year, India imported $110 million in rough colored stones and exported $235 million. Eighty to 90 percent of those gems filtered through Jaipur, says Gaurav Joshi, the assistant director of the Jaipur office of Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council, a quasi-governmental agency charged with promoting India’s gem and jewelry industry.

While emerald and tanzanite are processed in mass quantities here, so, too, are stones from all the corners of the gem world: moonstones from Sri Lanka, tsavorites from East Africa, tourmalines from Brazil, rubies from Burma. To the delight of jewelry connoisseurs the world over, Munnu uses all of them.

But those who can’t make the trek to India to peruse the selection are welcome to schedule a viewing in New York, where Gem Palace recently opened a by-appointment-only salon in a charming brownstone on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The company—familiar to patrons of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Barneys, two venues that regularly sell Munnu’s jewels—chose New York for its first showroom outside of India to augment its fast-rising reputation, bolstered in recent months by fawning coverage in The New York Times, Robb Report and Time Style & Design, among other publications.

In addition to the increased international presence, Munnu’s work—now leaning toward a fusion of Art Deco and rose-cut diamond designs featuring his favorite stones, old Golconda diamonds—also appears in the Diamond Information Center’s new right-hand ring campaign. Women of the world, you know what to do.