The Gem Palace of Jaipur is among the most historically significant jewellery houses in Asia — a firm that has operated continuously since 1852 under the stewardship of the Kasliwal family, serving successive Maharajas of Jaipur before expanding its clientele to include international collectors, museum curators, fashion houses, and heads of state. Situated on Mirza Ismail Road in the heart of Jaipur's old city, the establishment occupies a position in Indian jewellery comparable to that of Cartier or Van Cleef & Arpels in the European tradition: a house whose identity is inseparable from the history of the court it served, and whose archive of commissions constitutes a material record of subcontinental luxury over more than a century and a half.

Origins and the Kasliwal Family

The Kasliwals are a Jain merchant family whose involvement in the gem and jewellery trade predates the formal founding of the Gem Palace. The house was established in 1852 during the reign of Maharaja Ram Singh II of Jaipur, who ruled from 1835 to 1880 and was himself a noted patron of the arts. The appointment as royal jeweller placed the Kasliwals at the centre of one of the most lavish courts in Rajputana — a court that maintained close ties with the Mughal aesthetic tradition even as the Mughal empire itself had long since declined. The family's role was not merely commercial; court jewellers in the Indian tradition functioned as advisers on gemstone acquisition, custodians of royal gem inventories, and craftsmen capable of executing commissions of extraordinary complexity on short notice.

The house passed through successive generations of the Kasliwal family, each trained from youth in the identification and valuation of gemstones as well as in the design vocabularies of Rajput and Mughal jewellery. This continuity of family ownership and craft knowledge is central to the Gem Palace's identity. Unlike European luxury houses that were acquired by conglomerates during the twentieth century, the Gem Palace has remained a family enterprise, and the current generation — most visibly Sanjay Kasliwal — has been responsible for its international reputation since the 1980s and 1990s.

The Jaipur Context: A City Built for Gemstones

To understand the Gem Palace, one must understand Jaipur's singular position in the global gem trade. The city, founded in 1727 by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II, was planned from its inception as a centre of commerce and craft. Its mohallas (craft quarters) included dedicated districts for gem cutting and polishing, and Jaipur rapidly became — and has remained — the world's foremost centre for the cutting of coloured gemstones, particularly emeralds, rubies, sapphires, and the range of semi-precious stones used in traditional Indian jewellery.

Jaipur's lapidaries are especially celebrated for their mastery of the cabochon cut and for the kundan setting technique, in which pure gold foil is burnished around unset stones to create a seamless, almost molten-looking mount. The city is also the principal global centre for meenakari — the art of enamelling on gold — a craft that reached its apogee in Mughal court workshops and was transplanted to Jaipur by artisans brought from Lahore in the seventeenth century. The Gem Palace's workshops draw on all of these traditions, employing craftsmen whose families have practised specific techniques across multiple generations.

Design Vocabulary: Mughal Inheritance and Rajput Sensibility

The jewellery produced by the Gem Palace is rooted in the Mughal aesthetic that dominated north Indian court culture from the sixteenth century onward. Characteristic motifs include the kalgi (aigrette), the sarpech (turban ornament), floral sprays rendered in polychrome enamel, and the use of large, often uncut or table-cut gemstones set in high relief against enamelled gold. The Mughal preference for the intrinsic beauty of the rough stone — for its colour and translucency rather than its brilliance as a cut gem — persists in Gem Palace work, where emeralds from Colombia, rubies from Burma, and spinels from the historic Badakhshan mines may appear as cabochons or even in their natural crystal form.

Rajput jewellery adds its own layer: a boldness of scale, a preference for strong colour contrasts, and an integration of jewellery with dress and armour that differs from the more intimate scale of Mughal personal ornament. Gem Palace pieces frequently combine these registers — a sarpech might be executed in the Mughal floral idiom but set with the vivid, saturated stones favoured by Rajput taste.

The house also produces work in the jadau tradition, in which gemstones are set directly into a gold base without prongs or bezels, the gold itself being worked around each stone in the kundan manner. The reverse sides of such pieces are invariably enamelled in the meenakari technique, since in Indian jewellery the back of a piece is considered as important as the front — it is visible when the ornament is removed and laid on a surface, and the enamel work is understood as a mark of the jeweller's completeness of attention.

Royal Commissions and the Archive

The Gem Palace's archive of royal commissions spans the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period that coincided with the great age of Indian princely display. The Maharajas of Jaipur — particularly Sawai Madho Singh II (r. 1880–1922) and Sawai Man Singh II (r. 1922–1949) — were among the most celebrated jewellery collectors in the world, and their patronage of the Gem Palace resulted in pieces of exceptional ambition. Maharaja Man Singh II, who married the glamorous Gayatri Devi in 1940, presided over a court whose jewellery was documented by international photographers and journalists, bringing Jaipur's jewellery tradition to a global audience for the first time.

The house also served other Rajput and princely courts beyond Jaipur, as well as Mughal-descended nobility. The breadth of this clientele meant that the Kasliwals accumulated expertise in a wide range of regional jewellery traditions, and their workshops became a repository of technical knowledge that might otherwise have been lost as individual court workshops disbanded after Indian independence in 1947 and the formal abolition of the privy purse system in 1971.

Gemstone Selection and Sourcing

A defining characteristic of the Gem Palace is the quality of its gemstone selection. The Kasliwals have historically sourced directly from mines and from the networks of gem dealers that converge on Jaipur, and the house's reputation rests in part on its access to exceptional material. Particular strengths include Colombian emeralds of the deep, slightly bluish-green colour prized in the Mughal tradition; Burmese rubies and spinels; Kashmir sapphires (though supply from that source has been effectively exhausted since the early twentieth century, historic stones occasionally appear through estate acquisitions); and the full range of Indian and Sri Lankan material including hessonite garnet (gomed), yellow sapphire (pukhraj), and cat's-eye chrysoberyl.

The Gem Palace also handles historic stones with documented provenance — pieces that passed through Rajput treasuries or were acquired at the dispersal sales that followed the end of the princely system. Such stones carry a premium not only for their quality but for the historical narratives they embody, and the Kasliwals are recognised as knowledgeable custodians of that provenance.

International Expansion and Museum Relationships

From the 1980s onward, Sanjay Kasliwal led the Gem Palace's engagement with an international clientele, exhibiting at major fairs and cultivating relationships with collectors, curators, and fashion figures in Europe and North America. The house supplied pieces to major museum collections and collaborated with institutions mounting exhibitions on Indian jewellery and the Mughal decorative arts. These relationships have served a dual purpose: they have brought Gem Palace work to scholarly attention, and they have provided the house with a form of institutional validation that reinforces its standing in the luxury market.

The Gem Palace also attracted the attention of the international fashion world. Designers including Karl Lagerfeld and Donna Karan are documented as having acquired pieces from the house, and the Gem Palace's aesthetic — its combination of historical depth, material richness, and the particular chromatic intensity of Indian jewellery — proved influential on Western designers working with Indian motifs during the late twentieth century.

A New York outpost was established, allowing the house to serve American clients directly, though the primary workshop and showroom remain in Jaipur, where the physical context of the old city and its craft quarters is understood as integral to the enterprise.

Craftsmanship and Workshop Practice

The Gem Palace maintains workshops staffed by hereditary craftsmen — karigar — whose specialisations are typically inherited. The division of labour in traditional Indian jewellery workshops is highly refined: separate craftsmen handle the fabrication of the gold base, the kundan setting, the meenakari enamelling, and the stringing of beads and pearls. The Gem Palace's workshops preserve this structure, and the house is regarded as one of the few remaining establishments in Jaipur where the full range of traditional techniques is practised at the highest level.

The making of a major jadau piece — a necklace, say, combining Colombian emeralds with Burmese rubies in a floral kundan mount with polychrome enamel reverse — may involve dozens of craftsmen working over many months. The coordination of this process, and the maintenance of design coherence across multiple specialist hands, is itself a form of expertise that the Kasliwals have cultivated across generations.

Significance and Legacy

The Gem Palace occupies a unique position in the history of jewellery for several reasons. It represents a direct, unbroken line of continuity from the court jeweller tradition of Mughal and Rajput India to the contemporary luxury market — a continuity that is rare even among the oldest European houses. Its archive and its craftsmen constitute a living repository of techniques and design knowledge that would otherwise exist only in museum collections and historical photographs.

At the same time, the house has demonstrated that this tradition is not a museum piece. The Gem Palace's international success since the 1980s reflects a genuine engagement with contemporary collecting culture, and its pieces are sought not as ethnographic curiosities but as works of jewellery art valued on their own terms. In this respect, the Gem Palace has achieved something that few historic craft establishments manage: the translation of a deeply localised tradition into a form that commands respect and desire in a global market, without sacrificing the specificity that makes the tradition worth preserving.

For the gemmologist and the jewellery historian alike, the Gem Palace is an essential reference point — a place where the material culture of the Mughal and Rajput courts remains accessible, where the stones that furnished those courts can still be examined and acquired, and where the craft knowledge that transformed those stones into objects of extraordinary beauty continues to be practised with undiminished seriousness.

Further Reading

• GIA Gems & Gemology — The Jaipur Gem Industry
• GIA Gems & Gemology — India's Gem Trade