Gold was only the setting

Meenu Subbiah's claim is that India's jewellery memory has been erased rather than lost: diamonds were first found here and worn here for a thousand years, and gold arrived later as merely the metal that held the stones, which is why the great historic pieces now sitting in foreign collections are diamonds, rubies, emeralds and spinels. She started about thirty-three years ago in a Chennai bedroom with her father's old table, a hand-drawn catalogue and karigars brought down from Kolkata, in a market where every store sold gold and only round brilliants counted as diamonds. Two positions have held since. First, scarcity is the product: never more than four or five pieces of a design, no mainstream advertising because it would dilute what took decades to build, and the venture capital that comes knocking politely declined. A stint manufacturing for a corporate brand taught them systems, checks and a state-of-the-art factory, and also that they are not built to make thousands of the same thing. Second, craft carries a duty: an alloy costing two to three times the normal one because cadmium is carcinogenic for artisans to breathe, and Pettagam, a museum named for the iron vault every Chettinad house keeps, built so closed-setting jewellery, a technique nobody outside southern India has cracked, does not die quietly. The surprise is generational. The heritage lines she designed for forty-year-olds sell to twenty-somethings who walk in with a photograph of a grandmother's piece the family once had to sell, and ask for it back.