How Patiala Maharaja’s missing necklace, made by Cartier, landed up at Met Gala

Patiala Maharaja Bhupinder Singh’s necklace took around three years to be made and went on to be the pride of the Patiala dynasty in the 1930s. But it disappeared from the public eye a few decades later, was found in bits and pieces, and restored with replicas of the gemstones that had been stolen. On May 2, 2022, YouTube sensation and Cartier ambassador Emma Chamberlain was spotted at the Met Gala wearing a diamond choker that was part of the restored necklace.Bhupinder Singh had commissioned the famed Patiala Necklace to French jewellery giant Cartier at the luxurious Claridge Hotel in Paris around 1935. Malvinder Singh, the grandson of Maharaja Bhupinder Singh, speaks to The Times of India about the necklace, its chequered past and subsequent restoration. The first time he saw the necklace was in 1947.“There was a durbar outside the old Moti Bagh, and I remember asking my governess -- what is that shiny thing that papa has on?” Singh says. “And she said, that’s his necklace. And, so that is the first impression I had as a little four-year-old. It was completed in 1938. I think it was commissioned about two or three years before that. Because my grandfather last went to England and Paris in 1935. The bib-style neckpiece was quite a breath-taking sight. It had a neck collar and five chains, studded with around 2,930 diamonds adding up to almost a thousand carats.Its centrepiece was the pale yellow De Beers diamond, which was the seventh largest diamond in the world at that time. The 234-carat octahedral diamond had been dug out of the De Beers mines in South Africa in the late 19th century, and had been acquired by Maharaja Bhupinder Singh from an auction in Paris.Seven other large diamonds, ranging between 18 and 73 carats, adorned the neckpiece, with a few Burmese rubies thrown in. Malvinder Singh elaborates:“The gemstones, to the best of my knowledge, they are, they are diamonds. And, there’s of course, yellow diamonds. And there are three emeralds, I’m sorry, rubies, if I’m not mistaken. And the metal is platinum. Goodness knows when these stones were collected. Patiala had been at war with varying tribes, right till the time of Ahmad Shah Abdali. Some were collected from somewhere, some from somewhere, some were taken as war booty. And they were all lying, and my grandfather decided that he wanted to commission a necklace and utilize these stones which were lying around idle”The famous Maharaja of Patiala Maharaja Bhupinder Singh was the most talked about king from Patiala. He was a spitting image of extravagance, and had quite an appetite for wine, women, jewels, sports cars and, of course, cricket. He captained the Indian cricket team that went to England in 1911 and was the founder of what we now call the Board of Control for Cricket in India. The Maharaja even introduced the Ranjhi Trophy, in honour of his friend and cricketer, Maharaja Ranjitsinhji of Nawanagar. He served as an honorary lieutenant-colonel during the First World War and also represented India at the League of Nations in 1925.His cavalcade of 27 Rolls Royces revving up to the summer palaces in the hills of Chail and Kandaghat was a sight to behold. Among his other prized possessions was a Maybach gifted by Adolf Hitler during his visit to meet the Fuhrer in 1935. Cartier connectionMaison de Cartier founder Louis-François Cartier’s grandson, Jacques Cartier, had met Maharaja Bhupinder Singh on his first trip to India in 1911. By then, the luxury brand had already earned a name for itself, even being called “the jeweller of kings and the king of jewellers” by King Edward VII of Great Britain. The British king had ordered 27 tiaras from Cartier for his coronation in 1902, issuing it a royal warrant two years later that added to the brand’s prestige. In the 1930s, The Maharaja of Patiala gave Cartier one of its largest ever commissions -- the resetting of his crown jewels, which included the necklace. Malvinder Singh had met a Cartier representative in Delhi around 20-25 years ago, and they had had a long conversation regarding the Patiala necklace and the other bespoke jewellery commissioned to the French luxury brand. Malvinder Singh shares what Cartier informed: “According to Cartier, if you read Cartier’s book, it very categorically says he gave five boxes of jewels... stones to them... and asked them to commission the necklace.” A family heirloomBut Maharaja Bhupinder Singh didn’t even get a chance to put on the necklace before his death. His son, Maharaja Yadavindra Singh, was the first to wear it. “I’ve never seen my grandfather wearing it,” Malvinder Singh says. “There’s no picture of him wearing it. It was only worn by his son, my father. And, my father came on the throne in 1938 on the 23rd of March. That’s the day Bhupinder Singh died. And, after that, he wore it on most state occasions.”Khushwant Singh, the authorised biographer of Malvinder Singh’s elder brother and former Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh, says the necklace had travelled with Maharaja Yadavindra Singh to the Hague, during his tenure as the Indian Ambassador to Netherlands beginning in 1971. The Maharaja died of a heart attack there in 1974.“It was actually with the Maharaja of Patiala when he died in the Hague. I think it disappeared from there,” Khushwant Singh says.Malvinder Singh had repeatedly tried to find out how it disappeared and where it went, prodding his father’s military secretary regarding the vanished necklace, even asking his mother about it, but without any success. “I asked my mother once or twice,” Malvinder Singh says. “I said where did it go, she said I don’t know. Because in those days, jewellery didn’t stay with either the ruler, or his wives, or the ladies or whoever else there was. There was a whole khazana, and there was a person called a khajanchi who was in charge of it all. So, where it went, how it went, obviously gone on the orders of the ruler... I don’t know where it went.”How the necklace was foundThe De Beers diamond could be traced back to a Sotheby’s auction in Geneva around 1982, but the necklace was nowhere to be found. In 1998, Cartier associate Eric Nussbaum stumbled upon bits and pieces of the necklace at an antique shop in London. But that was a mere ghost, a skeleton stripped of all the big diamonds and rubies, and all its past glory. Dr Usha Balakrishnan, chief curator of the World Diamond Museum in London and a pre-eminent historian of Indian jewellery, believes there was nothing left of the original necklace except for the platinum collets. “The original Patiala Necklace is completely restored,” she says. “It is only the setting, the blank setting that is original, the platinum collets that are original. Every stone in that necklace is a cubic zirconia, you know they are synthetic stones, they are not real stones. Because the real stones have long since vanished.”How Patiala necklace was restoredCartier took four years to reconstruct the necklace in a mirror image of the original. The lost jewels were replaced with replicas --- cubic zirconia and synthetic diamonds. In its original form, with all the diamonds and rubies intact, the necklace would have fetched nothing less than $50 million.Maharaja Bhupinder Singh’s granddaughter, Jyotsna Singh, who is incidentally a jewellery designer in California, helped organise an exhibition titled “Maharaja: The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts” at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, where the recreated necklace was displayed. In an interview put on YouTube by the museum in 2012, Jyotsna Singh spoke about how she felt on seeing a restored heirloom from her family at the exhibition. Asked how she felt she you first saw her grandfather’s necklace in the exhibition, Jyotsna Singh said: “It was really very emotional for me; it wasn’t so much the beauty of the necklace or the extravagance of the necklace, but the fact that I was actually looking at a necklace that belonged to the family, in San Francisco which is halfway across the world. And, I really wish that my mother was there.”The neckpiece has been showcased at various Cartier exhibitions around the world ever since its restoration. The most recent outing of the diamond choker, which is part of the restored necklace, was at the Met Gala this year. Cartier ambassador Emma Chamberlain wore it to the event on May 2, 2022, drawing out quite a tirade on Twitter. The Met Gala is an annual fundraising benefit function organized by American fashion magazine Vogue for New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is touted as “fashion’s biggest night out”, drawing in celebrities from the world of fashion, cinema, theatre, television, music, sports and even politics.After Chamberlain’s appearance, a particularly scathing tweet tagging Cartier said: “Thanks #cartier. Those are the jewels of the Maharaja of Patiala. That’s a piece of India’s stolen history, not a fancy piece of jewellery to lend out to celebrities. Disrespectful on so many levels.” However, Balakrishnan insists that what Chamberlain wore was not the actual necklace, but a restored replica. “It’s only when the necklace appeared at the Met Gala, worn by Emma Chamberlain, that everybody even realised that it was a Cartier piece,” she says. “So, it is not what is popularly known as the Patiala Necklace.”She also doesn’t buy the notion that the original necklace was stolen, saying that it might have been an exercise in liquidation of personal assets, given that the royal families lost their privy purses and all the revenue that was coming into their royal treasury after Independence. Voices: Sanyam Sharma, Pallavi Bharti, Surjan Singh, and Sahil GuptaAudio production: Sahil Gupta