Dazzle and deceit

The French salesman had never encountered such an unusual request. Before him, a young Indian ruler demanded that he open a wooden chest crammed with newspaper scraps. After some bewilderment, he gingerly unfolded them. Out tumbled a Burmese ruby the size of a quail’s egg — then another. And then, astonishingly, the 234.65-carat De Beers yellow diamond, brighter than a chandelier, lighter than an egg, rarer than a snow leopard in a backyard.

A Maharaja with big feelings

It was 1925. The young man was Bhupinder Singh, the Maharaja of Patiala. In an era thick with anticolonial tension, he was entrusting Cartier with over 1,000 carats of his most prized stones — without even asking for a receipt. What emerged from the encounter was the Patiala necklace — now on display at the Cartier exhibit at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. The necklace’s 2,930 diamonds, including the cushion-cut De Beers yellow diamond, dance like captured sunlight. It remains Cartier’s single largest order to date. 

Standing before the necklace, one sees it as less an ornament and more a refuge. It is a psychological bulwark that transformed the Maharaja’s frailty into an impenetrable force. 

Power and politics of jewels

Jewels are never merely decorative — they are mirrors of power, politics, and psychology. 

In August 2025, the United States imposed a 50% tariff on Indian gemstones and jewellery imports, up from previous rates of 2-7%, which is expected to lead to a significant decline in trade volume.

Historically, India was an early source of diamond sourcing. It has today evolved into a hub of innovation and consumption, with Surat now accounting for over 90% of the world’s diamond cutting and polishing. Jaipur’s jewellery exports to the US have skyrocketed to Rs 3,200 crores annually.

As the world’s second-largest jewellery market after China, India’s influence reaches beyond the industry; it is both cultural and economic. The US tariffs pose a significant threat to India’s $94 billion gem industry, endangering the livelihoods of approximately 5 million people and compromising national economic progress. The global jewellery market is on an explosive ascent, with sales predicted to soar from $57 billion in 2025 to nearly $100 billion by 2030, eclipsing every other luxury sector. Jewellery transcends mere accessorising; it offers one of the sharpest lenses on the luxury market’s future.

To understand how jewels became a stage for national anxieties, one must return to the interwar years, when Indian royalty — long arbiters of extravagance — found their symbols of power suddenly unstable.

The 1920s marked a crisis for Indian royalty. They had long relied on luxury goods, symbols of European prestige, to stage sovereignty. But the tide of anticolonial sentiment was inverting their prestige — and no antidote could soothe their panic. When a Rolls-Royce salesman snubbed the Maharaja of Alwar, he purchased the entire fleet and converted them into garbage trucks. In this tumultuous climate, the Maharaja of Patiala — flaunting 10 wives, 180 concubines, 44 Rolls-Royces, and 1200 slain tigers — found himself exposed. His solution was reimagining his spectacular jewels. The Patiala necklace on his body embodied the pinnacle of wealth and divinity, symbolising him as a king who encompassed the cosmos and commanded the span of empires and eras.

Jewels as real stars!

Throughout cultures and centuries, jewellery has been a platform for political expression. For instance, in March 2024, India’s wealthiest family hosted a wedding that resembled a global summit. Helicopters circled. Dignitaries and Bollywood royalty mingled. But the real stars were the jewels. Alia Bhatt glowed in Colombian emeralds the size of eggs; Deepika Padukone shone beneath a rivière of diamonds, and Aishwarya Rai gleamed in Burmese rubies. The Patiala necklace boldly challenged colonial devaluation, while the Ambani emeralds powerfully declared India’s emergence as a formidable economic and cultural force on the global stage.

What explains jewellery’s lasting fascination?

The bidding wars of today echo the royal commissions of the past. In 2022, Sotheby’s Hong Kong sold the Williamson Pink Star — an 11.15-carat diamond, thumb-sized and among the purest pinks ever known — for $57.7 million. What drove the price of the Pink Star was not only its intrinsic rarity but also its symbolic significance. Its older sister, the 54-carat Williamson Stone, mined from the same Tanzanian mine, famously adorned Queen Elizabeth II.

Nowhere is the faith in the aura of stone more powerful than in South Asia. In 3000 BCE, the Sumerians and Babylonians recognised stones as powerful entities, attributing them with curative properties. They used these stones as protective amulets, planetary talismans, and as symbols of divine favour. From around 1500 BCE, the Rigveda and later Ayurvedic treatises described gems as carriers of cosmic energy. Soon, the belief in the paranormal powers of stones spread to other parts of the world.

Confucian and Daoist texts referred to jade as a bridge between heaven and earth, embodying the virtues of benevolence, wisdom, and purity. Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (500–1600 CE), gemstones were believed to possess significant protective properties: sapphires were thought to guard against poison, garnets were believed to heal wounds, and pearls symbolised chastity.

Provenance and a journey of scars and sentiments are where a jewel’s true magnetism lies, sharpening its power to seduce. “The only love affair I ever had that lasted,” Elizabeth Taylor once said, “was with my Bulgari gems.” 

The power of myths 

Myths also influence markets, and Cartier has crafted some myths as well. The Hope Diamond embodies this paradox. The blue-grey stone, mined in Kollur and now valued at up to $350 million, is infamous for its curse. Owners have been mauled, starved, beheaded, drowned, or shot. The strangest being to sport the world’s most famous gemstone, however, was Evalyn Walsh McLean’s poodle. The jewel was displayed on its collar at his million-dollar birthday bash. 

Few myths are as politically charged as the fate of the Kohinoor. When Queen Camilla refrained from wearing the diamond — now a flashpoint in the repatriation debate and a potent emblem of colonial plunder and unresolved injustice — its absence signalled not a matter of style, but a deliberate effort to silence a reminder of empire at a time when Britain can ill afford renewed demands for restitution. 

If the Hope was a myth passed down through inheritance, Maria Felix, famed to be “the most beautiful face in the history of Mexican cinema”, created her own myth. In 1975, she arrived at Cartier’s Paris boutique carrying a live crocodile, insisting that the jeweller design a piece inspired by the reptile. Cartier responded with the Crocodile necklace, a stunning masterpiece featuring two articulated crocodiles joined at the tail — one adorned with emeralds and rubies, the other with yellow diamonds and emeralds. 

Reptiles symbolise libido and transformation. By encircling her throat with a serpent, Félix illustrated her fragility and invulnerability, channelling her psyche as both dangerous and dazzling. She was saying symbolically: “Even where I could be most destroyed, I am invincible.” Through this creation, Cartier did more than set stones — it immortalised a persona. 

This is the essence of luxury: myth creates a sense of timelessness. Owning such a jewel means stepping into a story, becoming part of a lineage. Myth elevates jewellery to a symbol — and we crave objects that promise more than their physical presence. In light of unresolved histories and psychologies, wearers have the opportunity to resolve or rewrite their narratives. The question truly being posed is: Is the crocodile representative of the woman, or is the woman somehow reptilian?

Jewellery’s primary buyers

In luxury’s language, gender writes its own grammar, and brands have long tailored their storytelling to gendered desires. Women are jewellery’s primary buyers, often tethered to rituals of marriage, inheritance, and memory. Increasingly, they are buying for themselves — not as gifts received, but as declarations of agency. Men, conversely, channel their desire for permanence into watches and cars. A watch’s tick is a promise of fidelity, an heirloom against entropy.

Cars deepen the metaphor. Beneath their claims of torque and horsepower lies undeniable vulnerability: while the car stands as a fortress against betrayal, it simultaneously hums with uncertainty. Men disguise intimacy as machinery; women display it openly in diamonds. Both are love stories—only one admits it.

Maharajas to millennials

Many global brands advertise jewellery in the language of intimacy and romance, while some appeal to men through conquest and performance. Both, in the end, sell permanence — the only difference lies in the rhetoric that frames it. In an age dominated by algorithms and digital goods, the appeal of jewellery may seem outdated. But when a young professional in Shanghai invests in a Cartier ring, they are connecting themselves to a lineage that spans maharajas and queens.

Jewellery’s interplay between heritage and modernity is most evident in India. Many domestic brands position jewellery as part of family rituals and a means of cultural continuity. Global brands market jewellery as an entry into an exclusive international community. Both are successful, highlighting jewellery’s role in identity and belonging. The contemporary dispute between Punjabi singer Diljit Dosanjh, who sought to wear the Patiala necklace but was denied by Cartier, underscores the friction and complexity in heritage, custodianship, and corporate branding. 

Diamonds are not forever?

If jewellery once served as armour for kings, today it is currency for a new class of global buyers. The clients driving the high-end jewellery market are not aristocrats but Millennials and Gen Z, who regard it more as a versatile asset — something to wear, resell, or pass on. But just as jewellery seems anchored in continuity, science has unsettled its foundations. Since 2022, lab-grown diamonds (LGDs) have disrupted the market and changed the competitive landscape. Cheaper and indistinguishable, they now dominate US sales of loose stones. By 2030, LGDs are projected to account for one-fifth of the diamond jewellery’s total value. Value, whether from provenance or lab-grown sources, is defined by the authenticity of its story rather than its substance.

Luxury as leverage

India has consistently imposed some of the highest tariffs on luxury imports, which range from 12.5% to 15%, a strategic element of the Make in India initiative, aimed at fostering domestic consumption. In Mumbai, a Hermès necklace can cost nearly twice as much as in Dubai, revealing significant symbolic discrepancies and political implications. The Surat Diamond Bourse —hailed as the world’s largest office complex — still struggles to fill all its empty spaces. This underscores the importance of trade diplomacy and diversification for export-driven economies. 

As politics, AI, and culture wars redraw the industry, jewellery stands exposed as more than luxury — as leverage. From the radiant Patiala necklace to the breathtaking Pink Star, from the vengeful Rolls-Royces to today’s contentious tariff battles, jewels have seduced, schemed, and scarred through the ages.  Each gemstone tells a story of intrigue and power, leaving indelible scars on history. The famous De Beers yellow diamond, lost since 1948, reemerged at a Geneva auction but has gone quiet again, hinting at more tantalising stories when it does surface again. Our fascination with gems endures because stones anchor stories. It is the truth of an unwritten, sometimes merciless history refracting on skin.

The writer is a clinical psychologist, author and cultural storyteller with a doctorate from The University of Chicago.