The Most Expensive Indian Royal Necklaces Ever Made!

The most expensive Indian royal necklace is ever made. One Indian necklace is worth more than 60 million dollars, and it was not made by a king. It was made in the last few years. Another jewel on this list sold for millions, then the sale collapsed overnight when the buyer stopped trusting its own history. A diamond stolen from a royal treasury is still stuck in a courtroom battle today. A necklace that no longer physically exists just walked down a red carpet again, rebuilt stone for stone. These are not museum relics gathering dust. These are the most expensive, most priceless Indian royal necklaces ever made, ranked, and some of them are still causing trouble right now. Nita Ambani's Mughal Emerald Necklace This one breaks every record on this list, and it was made in our lifetime. The necklace holds two uncut Colombian emeralds. The larger one alone weighs 562.79 carats. The smaller weighs just over 300 carats. Together they anchor a piece worth an estimated 500 core rupees, close to 60 million dollars. Nita Ambani wore it at her son-announced wedding festivities in Jamnagar, where it stopped conversations cold on the red carpet. It took three years to build. The emeralds were never cut or enhanced, kept raw to protect their rarity, and set beside 52-carat Mughal-era diamonds. Gemological testing on the stones found no clarity treatment at all, which is almost unheard of at this size. The design borrows directly from Mughal court jewellery, all symmetry and gold filigree, built by master jewellers who spent years just sourcing stones large enough to match the concept. It is still in the Ambani family's private collection today. A modern necklace just outpriced every historic Maharaja on this list. But wait until you see what the actual Nizam of Hyderabad once owned. The Princey Diamond A pink diamond once owned by the richest man in the world triggered a legal war 40 years after it left India. The Princey is a 34.65-carat cushion-cut, pink diamond pulled from the Golconda mines, the same source as the Hope Diamond and the Koh-i-Noor. It sat quietly in the treasury of the Nizam of Hyderabad for generations, first documented in the 1700s. In 1960 it surfaced at Sotheby's, sold as property of a gentleman, a phrase auction houses use when a seller wants total anonymity. Van Cleef & Arpels bought it for £46,000 and set it in a pendant necklace, naming it after a 14-year-old boy nicknamed Princey. In 2013 Christie's sold it for $39.3 million, a record for any Golconda diamond and the most valuable jewel the house had ever sold in the United States. But the celebration did not last long. A family came forward claiming the stone had been stolen from a relative decades earlier and sued for its return or compensation, dragging the sale into court. Today it belongs to the Royal Family of Qatar. The lawsuit still hangs over its provenance and its exact resting place has never been confirmed since. The Jewels of the Nizam of Hyderabad One royal family's treasury was worth more than some entire countries and India nearly lost it to a foreign auction block. This is not a single piece, but the full trove once held by the 7th Nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan, considered the wealthiest man on earth in his time. The collection includes a seven-strand Basra pearl necklace strung with 465 natural pearls, along with diamond belts, sword hilts and turban ornaments dripping in Golconda stones. Sotheby's once appraised the full trove at $350 million. In 1979, as an international sale was being arranged in Delhi, the Attorney General of India rushed into court to try and stop it, arguing the jewels were national treasure. The judge refused to block the sale outright but invited the government to bid instead. After decades stuck in litigation, the government finally purchased the collection from the Nizam's Trust for roughly $65-67 million. Pieces from this same collection now sit in Indian National Reserves, rarely shown to the public. What almost left the country forever instead stayed home. The Patiala necklace. Cartier once built a necklace so extravagant it disappeared for over three decades, and when it came back, half of it was missing. Commissioned in 1925 by Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala, who arrived in Paris with trunks full of loose diamonds, emeralds and rubies, the piece held 2,930 diamonds centred on the 234.65 carat De Beers yellow diamond, one of the largest cushion-cut yellow diamonds on the planet. It took Cartier's workshop years to complete, and the house was so proud of the result it asked permission to exhibit the necklace publicly before shipping it to India. After India's independence, the necklace vanished from the Patiala treasury, and nobody could say where it went. In 1982, the De Beers diamond alone resurfaced at a Sotheby's auction, sold on its own, with no explanation for how it got there. In 1998, more pieces turned up in a second-hand shop in London. Cartier bought back what remained and spent years rebuilding the necklace with replica stones, standing in for the originals that never came back. It is now displayed in museum exhibitions and valued near $30 million. The matching choker from the same commission has been worn on red carpets since, most famously at the Met Gala in 2022, which set off a heated debate online about who that jewel truly belongs to. The Nizam's Mirror of Paradise This stone is so pure that gemologists call it a mirror. It is a 52.58 carat, internally flawless, decoloured diamond of Golconda origin, cut as tapered baguettes and mounted as a ring rather than a necklace centrepiece, though it traces back to the same Muggle-era treasury as everything else on this list. In 2019, Christie's sold it in New York for $6,517,500 as part of the historic Maharaja's and Mughal Magnificence sale. It later reappeared on Neeta Ambani's hand at the launch of her cultural centre in Mumbai and again at her son's pre-wedding celebrations. The Mughal-era stone, once locked in a princely vault, is now casually worn to modern parties. Maharani Gayatri Devi's Cartier Emerald Suite One of Vogue's most beautiful women in the world wore this necklace for a portrait, then quietly gave it away and let the world forget where it came from. This art deco necklace and earring suite was set by Cartier in London in the 1930s, built around Mughal cabochon emeralds from the 18th and 19th centuries, inlaid with tiny ruby and diamond flowers. The emeralds were originally Indian work, before Cartier reused them in a Western-style setting with baton-cut diamonds. Maharani Gayatri Devi of Jaipur is believed to have acquired the suite around 1940, the year she married Maharaja Sawai Mansingh II. She wore it in the now-famous Cecil Beaton portraits shot at Rambagh Palace, images that helped earn her a spot on Vogue's list of the ten most beautiful women in the world. Decades later, after clashing with the Indian government and being jailed during the emergency, Gayatri Devi grew disillusioned with the country's politics. Around 2001, she quietly donated the suite to the British Museum as an anonymous gift, a donation the museum agreed to keep unnamed until 2029. It sits today in room 47, a piece once shown off at Vogue-level glamour now behind museum glass. The Star of the South Necklace A diamond found by an enslaved woman in Brazil ended up dazzling Indian royalty on the other side of the world. The Star of the South was pulled from a riverbed in Brazil in 1853. Cut down to 128.48 carats, it eventually caught the eye of Maharaja Khanderao Gekwad of Baroda, who bought it for £80,000. He commissioned a three-strand necklace that paired it with the 78.5 carat English Dresden Diamond. By 1927, newspapers reported the Baroda jewel collection holding this piece was worth $10 million, an almost unthinkable figure for the era. Maharani Sita Devi of Baroda was photographed wearing a modified version in 1948. Cartier is reported to have acquired the diamond around 2002, and its exact whereabouts today remain unknown. The Taj Mahal Diamond Necklace A diamond inscribed with the Mughal Empress' name ended up on Elizabeth Taylor's neck, then vanished from an $8.8 million sale overnight. This heart-shaped, table-cut diamond is inscribed in Persian script with the name of Nur Jahan, wife of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir, and the phrase, Love is Everlasting. It later passed to Jahangir's son, who became Shah Jahan, the emperor who built the Taj Mahal as a tomb for his own wife, which is how the diamond got its name. Richard Burton bought the stone from Cartier and gave it to Elizabeth Taylor for her 40th Reportedly joking, he would have bought her the real Taj Mahal, but it would have cost too much to ship. In 2011, Christie's sold it for $8.8 million, a record for an Indian jewel at the time, until the anonymous buyer later challenged its Mughal-era provenance and demanded his money back. Christie's rescinded the sale, sparking a lawsuit between Taylor's estate and the auction house that dragged on for years without a clean resolution. Remarkably, the necklace resurfaced in early 2026, worn by actress Margot Robbie at a Los Angeles film premiere, proving this jewel simply refuses to stay out of the spotlight. The Patiala Ruby Choker Rubies once worn by Punjabi royalty resurfaced in the Swiss art market with no explanation for where they had been. Made by Cartier in 1931 for Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala, this choker holds 292 ruby beads totalling over 356 carats, strung alongside 132 natural pearls and accented with diamonds. Bhupinder Singh gave it to one of his wives, Maharani Bakhtawar Kaur. At some point it was cut down into a bracelet, stripped of its original length. It vanished from the Patiala treasury and only reappeared decades later in Switzerland in the Cartier bought and restored it in 2012, then sold it to the Qatari royal family's Alteani collection. In 2019 it sold at Christie's for $975,000 and has since toured major museums, including the Met and the Vienna. Neeta Ambani's Parrot-Shaped Kundan Pendant Necklace Two centuries of craft technique were revived for a single modern pendant. This piece is built using the Kundan method, an ancient Indian technique of setting gemstones in layers of pure gold foil without soldering. It combines rubies, emeralds, diamonds and pearls into a parrot-shaped design whose style dates back nearly 200 years. It is valued at roughly 200 crore rupees, close to $24 million. Neeta Ambani has worn it as a counterpoint to her more famous emerald pieces, proving old techniques can still command modern fortunes. The Nizam's Diamond Riviera Necklace An antique necklace nobody expected much from ended up blowing past its own estimate. This diamond riviera necklace came from the treasure house of the Nizams of Hyderabad. Christie's estimated it would sell for around $1.5 million at the 2019 Maharajas and Mughal Magnificence auction. Bidders had other plans. The final price landed at $2,415,000, well above expectations, for a 33-diamond design with no elaborate coloured stones, just pure old-cut brilliance. It shows that provenance alone tied to the Nizam's name can push a simple design past a much flashier one. The Nawanagar Necklace A necklace so rare it no longer physically exists, yet it just stole the show in a Hollywood heist film. Cartier's Jacques Cartier designed this emerald and diamond necklace in 1926 for Maharaja Ranjit Singhi of Nawanagar, a close personal friend and one of Cartier's most trusted Indian clients. It carries 17 rectangular Colombian emeralds totalling 277 carats, with a 70-carat emerald forming the base of a pendant reportedly linked to a former Ottoman sultan's collection. There is also a related two-strand diamond piece from the same royal house, built around a large blue diamond, a green diamond, and the 136-carat Queen of Holland diamond, larger than the Koh-i-Noor itself. Jacques Cartier called it the finest cascade of coloured diamonds in the world. Ranjit Singhi died before ever wearing his finished necklace. It was his nephew and successor who wore it on state occasions for years after. No confirmed modern sale price exists for either version. The originals were dismantled or lost to history, known now only through Cartier's archival photographs. Cartier later recreated a version of the diamond piece for the film Ocean's Eight, worn by Anne Hathaway, resized down from a design originally built for a man's neck. From a modern billionaire's emerald to a Mughal empress' diamond that just reappeared on a red carpet a few months ago, Indian royal jewellery keeps finding its way back into the light. Somewhere, one more forgotten piece from a Maharaja's vault is still waiting to resurface.