Wshington, Dec 01: A royal piece of princely India is on display in New York, and pretty big piece it is too. Big enough to stop even the brassy, hardened New Yorker to stop and stare. Cartier, the world famous jeweller, has put on display in its window on Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street the famous Patiala necklace, arguably one of the greatest pieces of jewellery ever made.

Custom-made for the Maharaja of Patiala in 1928, the biblike Art Deco parade necklace with giant gems and five rows of diamond-encrusted platinum chains has been restored after the royal family scattered its contents following the post-Independence decline of the princely state.

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The original Patiala necklace, according to Cartier, had 2,930 diamonds and weighed almost a thousand carats. It included as its centerpiece the famous De Beers diamond, a cushion-cut pale yellow diamond weighing 234.69 carats that is said to be the seventh largest polished diamond in the world and is nearly as big as a golf ball.

According to Cartier chronicles, the Maharaja of Patiala, Bhupinder Singh, brought the de Beers diamond and a pail of assorted stones to their store in Paris in 1925 and ordered them to fashion a necklace. The necklace was completed in three years later and Cartier was so proud of its craftsmanship that it asked if the necklace could be exhibited before being sent to India. He agreed and it was.

The Maharaja was often photographed wearing the necklace, and one such photo is on the Cartier website (www.cartier.com). The last time the necklace was seen intact was on his son, the Maharajah Yadavindra Singh, in 1941.

Over the years, the necklace was dismembered by the family and sold in bits and pieces. However, the original platinum chains and some of the stones surfaced in London in 1998, where it was spotted by Eric Nussbaum, a Swiss-born gemologist who is the curator of the Art of Cartier Collection.

Cartier bought the remnants and restored the necklace using substitute gems -- cubic zirconium to fill in the open settings of the original diamonds and synthetic rubies to replace the original Burmese ones. The necklace now looks like the original to the untrained eye. The original, according to Cartier, would be worth about $20 million to $30 million today.
Bureau Report