Gems Out of Hiding and Dazzling India

NEW DELHI — The seventh and last nizam of Hyderabad bore the burden of an eccentric father who liked to shower jewels on friends and acquaintances, forever digging into the riches of the royal vault for another bauble to hand out.

There was still enough glitter left in the treasury for His Exalted Highness Osman Ali Khan to inherit the title of world’s richest man and the crown when his father, Mahboob Ali Pasha, died in 1911.

But the father’s extravagant living, and India’s independence in 1947, knocked the seventh nizam down several pegs. The last treasures were for his eyes only--and to ensure that, he kept the key to the vault tucked away in the inside pocket of his vest.

Power waned, health failed, and the nizam--the title given to rulers of the Hyderabad region for more than two centuries--was no more. But finally, 34 years after his death, anyone with the price of admission can be dazzled by a collection of 173 of the dynasty’s jewels, including a diamond as big as a child’s fist.

By order of India’s Supreme Court, the nizam’s jewels go on display today at the National Museum in New Delhi in an exhibit that lasts until Oct. 15. The gems, several of which came from the nizam’s fabled Golconda mines, haven’t been on public display for more than half a century.

It is enough to make a jewel expert drool.

“Today, if jewelry of this caliber were to come back [onto the market], it would be a firestorm,” Rahul Kadakia, senior jewelry specialist at Christie’s auction house in New York, said in a telephone interview. “It is by far the most historical, the most important and probably one of the best collections of jewelry in the world.”

The collection includes turban ornaments, toe rings, buttons, bracelets, anklets and armbands, along with a jewel-encrusted gold belt containing more than 245 white and yellow diamonds that together weigh more than 640 carats.

There are delicately carved Colombian emeralds, Burmese rubies and pearls from the port of Basra in modern Iraq and the Gulf of Mannar near India’s southern tip.

But the centerpiece stands alone in a glass case, refracting the halogen light into a speckled rainbow. It is the Jacob diamond, widely believed to be the world’s seventh-largest at 184.75 carats. The last nizam discovered it wedged into the toe of his late father’s slipper and decided it would make a splendid paperweight.

The Jacob was mined in South Africa and named after diamond dealer Alexander Jacob, who was immortalized as Lurgan Sahib of the British Secret Service in Rudyard Kipling’s novel “Kim.”

The gem is said by the museum to be worth about $85 million but isn’t for sale at any price. The Indian government waged a 16-year court battle to keep the diamond and the rest of the nizam’s jewels off the auction block. To make doubly sure, special police armed with machine guns stand on 24-hour guard by the thick steel bars of the vault-like door leading to the exhibit room.

No one really knows the value of the nizam’s jewels. Foreign appraisers haven’t had a good look through their eyepieces since 1979, when the Indian government blocked an international auction at the last second.

With their mystique and exceptional quality, the jewels would send bidding “through the roof” if they were auctioned, said Kadakia, the Christie’s specialist.

The nizam of Hyderabad once reigned over a princely state in southern India covering 86,000 square miles. It was a realm blessed by the most storied source of quality diamonds in history: the Golconda mines.

“Today, if you have one small diamond with a certificate saying ‘Golconda origin,’ the stone immediately picks up a premium of 20% over any other stone of identical color and clarity in the market,” Kadakia said.

Discovered at least as early as the 1600s, the Golconda mines were the world’s first known to produce diamonds. They provided several of the finest stones ever cut, including the 45.52-carat Hope diamond, once owned by Louis XIV of France and considered one of the most exquisite blue diamonds.

An even more coveted Golconda stone is the Kohinoor diamond, spirited out of India and then returned, only to be presented to India’s British colonial rulers in tribute at the end of the Mogul empire, Kadakia said.

The 108.93-carat Kohinoor now rests in the Maltese Cross on the crown made for Britain’s queen mother, he added.

The looting of India’s cultural riches over the centuries left a scar on the national psyche, which a spectacular exhibit like this may help heal as it thrills Indians who file past the display cases.

“It is a national collection, and they’ll be proud of it,” said Jayant N. Chowlera, a government-approved appraiser assisting the National Museum.

Royal prerogative gave the nizam of Hyderabad first pick of any gems the miners hauled out of Golconda, so the nizam’s wealth seemed limitless--at least until the mine was exhausted in the early 1800s.

The riches kept pouring in, thanks, in part, to an unwritten rule that said anyone seeking favor at court should bring along some fine jewels and gold to put the nizam in an accommodating mood.

Hyderabad was founded more than four centuries ago on southern India’s Musi River; the city became known as a center of Muslim culture and the pearl trade. The nizam resisted pressure to join his realm to India until 1948, a year after the country won independence from British rule.

The nizam also had to surrender his land, which had once provided the income that was supposed to maintain “the dignity of the dynasty.”

Without it, the nizam was left short about $270,000 a year, so the government granted him a one-time privy purse of $106,000 and an additional annual allowance of another $106,000 for as long as he lived.

That wasn’t much for a man of title with a big family and more than 1,000 servants, and the nizam was afraid his precious jewels would soon be snatched. So he gave some to his grandchildren, and set up two trusts to protect the remaining 173 pieces.

The seventh nizam’s death in 1967 was followed three years later by the demise of his son, Prince Azam Jah. The jewelry trustees decided to sell the collection, which was locked away in the vault of the Bombay branch of a Hong Kong bank.

Just as an auctioneer was about to open up the bidding in 1979, the former head of India’s National Gallery of Arts walked in with a court order to stop the sale, and the jewels were locked away while lawyers argued for the next 16 years.

The government won in 1995, when India’s Supreme Court ordered that the nizam’s heirs would have to give up the jewels in exchange for just over $47 million, a small fraction of the gems’ estimated value on the international market. But the court also ordered the government to put the jewels on public display.

The heir to the title nizam of Hyderabad, drained by the bitter court battle, ended up immigrating to Australia, where he bought a farm.

“When you live like a king in India, you don’t live like that anywhere else,” Kadakia said.

One of the many enduring mysteries of the nizam’s jewels is the question of where the rest of them ended up. So many were given away as gifts or hidden away as insurance that experts have no doubt that there is much more to the nizam’s treasure than the 173 jewels behind museum glass.

“It would be a drop in the ocean,” said Chowlera, the appraiser.