Furore over Emma Chamberlain’s Met Gala diamond necklace puts India’s ‘stolen jewels’ in spotlight
- The US YouTuber drew flak for wearing the Cartier-designed jewellery, which originally belonged to an Indian king, at the New York event’s red carpet
- Experts say the incident has shone a light on other rare Indian diamonds hidden in vaults overseas and the need for laws to tackle the illicit trafficking of antiques
Popular US YouTuber Emma Chamberlain is facing a backlash from the South Asian community for wearing a controversial diamond necklace at New York’s Met Gala.
Controversy erupted as soon as Chamberlain walked onto the red carpet wearing the jewellery at the May 2 annual fundraising event attended by global glitterati for the benefit of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.
Word began to spread that the necklace originally belonged to Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala, in India’s northwest, one of the richest men in the world during his rule between 1900 and 1938.
Adorned with 2,930 diamonds and weighing over a thousand carats, the rare platinum ornament is embellished with Burmese rubies as well as a golf ball-sized, yellow 234.6-carat De Beers diamond – which was the seventh-largest in the world.
The necklace is said to have disappeared from the Patiala royal treasury around 1948. Several decades later, so the story goes, parts of it resurfaced at a second-hand London jewellery store in 1998 and were bought by the French luxury brand Cartier. The company subsequently recrafted the choker by replacing the missing diamonds and stones with replicas.
Cartier is now under fire from netizens for allowing Chamberlain to wear a “part of India’s stolen history”.
