How Indian Jewelers Create Bold New Pieces With Respect for Tradition

It’s an August evening in Mumbai, and Rahul and Roshni Jhaveri, the husband-and-wife cofounders of contemporary fine jewelry brand Studio Renn, are at home in the city’s upscale Malabar Hill neighborhood. They’re on a video call with a reporter when the conversation turns to their two-year-old Godna collection. Named after an Indigenous term for tattoo, the minimalist diamond and 18-karat-gold jewels take inspiration from the rich tradition of tattoo art practiced by the Baiga tribe in central India’s Madhya Pradesh state.

“It’s a rite of passage for the women, and they start getting tattooed at a very young age,” Rahul says. “By the time they’re married, they’re completely tattooed. They don’t have too many material things like jewelry to adorn themselves. So they’ve adorned themselves with tattoos.” 

Rahul pauses and gestures toward his legs, just off-screen. “I actually ended up getting a hand-poked tattoo myself, a fairly large one,” he says. “Over the past two years, I’ve realized that it’s become an important part of my identity.” 

With that, Rahul stands up. He’s wearing shorts, making the tattoo impossible to overlook. Integrated patterns of black ink decorate the lower portion of his left leg entirely, from below his left knee, down to his ankle. “These are crop lines,” he notes, pointing to three parallel lines above his ankle. The chevrons above them suggest fish bones, he explains, while a circle with a dot in its center, just below his knee, represents a diya (a small traditional Indian oil lamp) emanating light. 

The simplicity of the marks is echoed in the Godna collection, whose designs feature articulated ribs of high-polish 18-karat yellow gold lined with pavé diamonds and holding larger diamonds. While the line lacks the maximalist silhouettes and vibrant gemstone mixes that people have typically associated with Indian jewelry, Marion Fasel—a jewelry historian, author, and founder of the online jewelry publication The Adventurine—asserts that it’s a powerful expression of where contemporary-Indian-jewelry design is headed. “We can all understand the Mughal aesthetic,” she tells Robb Report. “But there’s so much more to the Indian vocabulary, and many designers have moved on.”

Look, for example, to Viren Bhagat, a Mumbai-born jeweler who has built a global coterie of private clients with designs that combine references to Mughal architecture and the understated lines of Art Deco. Committed to using only the most coveted gems, he makes fewer than 60 pieces a year. Further burnishing his reputation are his results at auction. In January, he opened a by-appointment-only salon in London’s Mayfair neighborhood, his first outside India. Speak to many ambitious and sophisticated jewelers of Indian heritage and you’ll hear a common refrain: Bhagat’s success story is one they’d be very happy to emulate.

Bhagat and the cohort of talented Indian designers he leads—from Delhi-based Hanut Singh, who juxtaposes colorful hard stones with pearls, enamel, and coral in talismanic designs that exude a Mughal-meets-modernity aesthetic, to Sabyasachi Mukherjee, an enormously successful fashion and accessories designer from Kolkata whose opulent jewels have found pride of place at Bergdorf Goodman—form a 21st-century jewelry diaspora, each interpreting traditional craftsmanship through the prism of their own experiences, both in India and abroad. Contrasting age-old techniques and silhouettes (think flat-cut diamonds in paisley forms) with minimalist, sculptural, or avant-garde sensibilities, their work speaks to a growing clientele that values both cultural lineage and wearability. The result: jewelry that is rooted in tradition, yet resonant with present-day collectors around the world.

Milan Chokshi’s trajectory is emblematic of how this band of designers has evolved. In the 1990s, Chokshi, founder of the Mumbai-based fine-jewelry brand Moksh, spent time in Carlsbad, Calif., studying at the Gemological Institute of America. He then worked for his family’s jewelry company—which had a distribution network from Belgium to Bangkok—producing inexpensive items for American retailers such as JCPenney and Sam’s Club as well as diamond-set pieces for the Indian domestic market. In 2004, he came to a realization that prompted him to open his own by-appointment salon on Mumbai’s Hughes Road, where he began offering high-end designs that reflected his Indian heritage as well as his global perspective.

“I grew up in the ’90s, so I was exposed to a changing environment globally, and I thought there were enough people like me who wanted a different retail experience and a different kind of product when they went out shopping for luxury, especially jewelry, in India,” Chokshi says on a recent video call from his home in Mumbai. “And that was the start.”

At the time, Indian consumers’ tastes in jewelry were more rooted in the West, he explains. “When I started this business, the tendency was for a woman to come in with a magazine showing an international brand and say, ‘I want to make this,’ ” he recalls. “And that stemmed from an inherent subservient mindset to a colonial past where they were brought up thinking that everything that is international is of better quality.”

“Nobody comes to us for that anymore,” he adds, with a note of satisfaction in his voice. Rather, what Moksh’s clients seek today are intricate designs redolent of Indian history, such as a handwoven bracelet made up of hundreds of tiny keshi pearls, hand-drilled and stitched together by a dedicated artisan and finished with a floral motif incorporating baguette diamonds, a brand signature. “This level of craftsmanship—nobody else does this,” Chokshi says. “When it’s combined with the baguettes and the complex engineering, that’s what sets our pieces apart.” 

Akshat Ghiya, the founder of Tallin, a fine-jewelry brand in the famed Pink City of Jaipur, is equally enamored of Indian workmanship, though he came by his love for it somewhat circuitously. Ghiya grew up in Padua, Italy, where his father, a gem dealer from Jaipur, based the business. Following boarding school in Switzerland, he earned his bachelor’s degree in economics and international relations at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Eight years ago, after exploring different career opportunities, he moved to Jaipur and committed to making the Gem City his permanent home.

“Today, the jewelry that I make is influenced primarily by my upbringing,” Ghiya says, noting the disparate viewpoints of the Italian and Indian cultures. “Sometimes we make jewelry that [we think] is maximalist and colorful and makes a statement, and when we show it in India, most Indians say, ‘Hey, why is your jewelry so small?’ I’m strongly influenced by the delicateness and sensibilities of Italian jewelry, so it’s merging the two [aesthetics].”

Ghiya divides the collection into Gentle Forms, referring to a range of floral jewels featuring petals of polki (uncut) diamonds and other irregularly shaped colored stones, and Sharp Forms, which incorporate carved emeralds, black onyx, turquoise, and pink tourmalines in geometric, Art Deco–inspired silhouettes. Despite their opposing vibes, the lines are united by a profound respect for the kind of techniques found only in India.

“A lot of our influences have this Indian soul while being global citizens,” Ghiya says. “We’re committed to making jewelry purely by hand. We don’t use CAD design. We don’t 3-D print. We are working in a space that is dying or dead around the world—you know, goldsmithing purely by hand, you can still do it here.” Goldsmithing, in fact, is Tallin’s biggest department.

The brand’s very name, derived from a Sanskrit word, encapsulates Ghiya’s internationalism. “To become tallin is to become obsessed or enamored to the point that it drives you crazy,” he explains. “I was looking for a word with ancient meaning that came from this land but also had a global intonation. It is a word that doesn’t immediately say one culture or another.”

And yet, being in such close proximity to Jaipur’s skilled lapidaries, who have perfected the art of stonecutting over generations, enables Tallin to custom-cut stones and experiment with different shapes and carving styles. “The other touch of India that our jewelry has is that almost every piece has some diamond in it,” Ghiya says. 

A love of stones—especially ancient diamonds and gems—is how Krishna Choudhary, a 10th-generation jeweler originally from Jaipur, unites his passions for antiquities and jewelry. Choudhary, a collector of contemporary art as well as Indian artifacts, considered a career in hospitality before he was seduced by the gems his family has traded for centuries. “Once I louped a stone, I could never go back,” he says. Each specimen’s unique characteristics reminded him of the patterns and patinas that distinguish the objects at the family’s haveli, or nobleman’s mansion, in the Pink City.

In 2019, two years after moving to London, Choudhary founded Santi, a high-jewelry atelier that he named for his father, the steward of the Jaipur-based family business, Royal Gems & Art. Choudhary’s vision for Santi was both a departure from and an homage to the tradition from which he emerged. At a recent showing in Los Angeles, he holds up an 18th-century navratna bangle from his private collection as a kind of explanation. (The Sanskrit term means “nine gems” and refers to a traditional Indian jewel featuring a mélange of stones—ruby, pearl, coral, garnet, emerald, yellow sapphire, blue sapphire, diamond, and cat’s eye—each relating to a different celestial body.)

“We can’t do any better than this,” Choudhary says. He’s talking about the meenakari enamel work on the bangle. “It’s the best of the best. We can’t give any more to this technique. It’s been on a downfall since the 17th century. All cartouche earrings featuring cushion-cut brown diamonds set in a slightly bronzed shade of yellow gold interspersed with wavy lines of negative space.

“I’m proud of being Indian,” Choudhary says. “I’m proud of where I come from. But I’m not just an Indian designer. I grew up in an international community. I collect contemporary art. It’s a beautiful dialogue.” 

When Arun Bohra founded Arunashi in L.A. in 2004, he, too, was keen to stand apart from the family jewelry business he’d left behind in Jaipur. In the early 1990s, he studied in Japan, where he opened a gemstone-trading company after graduation. He was drawn to the kinds of exotic materials favored by the Japanese—among them, rare stones such as color-changing alexandrites and blue-green Paraíba tourmalines—as opposed to, say, emeralds, a staple of the Indian-jewelry repertoire. “I was starting to make things in Europe more than in India, and I was of the mindset that I didn’t want to just get grouped as an Indian jeweler,” he tells Robb Report during a recent visit to his Beverly Hills salon, high above Wilshire Boulevard. “There was a lot of jewelry coming out of India that was very shoddily made. And for me, having spent years in Japan, I knew that my attention to detail was very different.”

Determined to create a brand with a sophisticated identity, with production divided between Jaipur and Europe, Bohra gradually developed a reputation for incorporating avant-garde materials, including titanium, aluminum, and carbon fiber, into his gem-centric pieces, many of which feature spectacular, deeply saturated stones.

Today, pieces by Arunashi—such as a statement cuff made of carbon fiber framed by pavé diamonds and centered on a lozenge-shape green beryl totaling more than 34 carats—are stocked at upscale stores including Marissa Collections. There they keep company with designs by a bevy of jewelers of Indian heritage—Saboo from Hong Kong, Sutra from Houston, and Neha Dani from New Delhi—that have also seduced the store’s American customers. “Our clients connect with the cultural influence and storytelling, as well as the craftsmanship, fine detail, exceptional gemstones, and innovative use of materials,” says Jennifer McCurry, Marissa Collections’ buyer and lead fine-jewelry curator. “While some very traditional pieces remain culturally specific, Indian jewelry is now appreciated globally for its craftsmanship, design innovation, and artistry—on the same stage as French, Italian, and American ateliers.”

The growing acceptance of Indian design is one reason Bohra no longer resists the Made in India label. “As we’ve matured as a brand and as I’ve seen the work improve, not just in what we do in our workshop in India, but also in other quarters that are coming from India, where you’ve got the likes of Bhagat and Santi, I’ve come full circle,” he says. “I couldn’t care less now.”