Indian Jewelry » Coloured Gemstones Jaipur

Jaipur: Colored Gems City
With a history dating back to more than two and a half centuries, the famed Indian Gems City of Jaipur is creating fresh history in its vibrant second innings. From tradition-bound manual processing of colored gems and the manufacture of specialized jewellery like Minakari, the long passage to a modern gems and jewellery sector has been a difficult and rather slow transition, but Jaipur has endeavoured to keep pace with changing times. It has been a double challenge - living up to past glory while moving ahead in modern times to meet growing global competition. So what Jaipur offers now is actually a glorious synthesis of the ancient and the contemporary.

Two Revolutions:
Jaipur had not only been the main colored gems processing centre of India, but it claims credit for initiating two virtual 'revolutions' in the world of colored gemstones. In the last mid-century, Jaipur pioneered the emerald boom, claiming for it global popularity and demand. Most of the world supply of cut and polished emerald flowed out from this gems city. The other revolution which Jaipur has triggered more recently has pushed the blue- darling 'tanzanite' to the blue sky. The craze for tanzanite jewellery in the U.S.A. followed the runaway success of the movie Titanic, in which the leading lady sported a lovely blue gems studded necklace. The boom that followed was actually fuelled by timely supply of cut and polished tanzanite from Jaipur, which became the leading processor of this blue magic. Besides emeralds and tanzanite, Jaipur has been processing the whole rainbow of colored gems, as well as pearls. The traditional processing work undertaken here with outstanding skill includes cutting and polishing of over a hundred species of colored gemstones, both natural and synthetic, carving, bead-making, stringing, manufacture of objets d' art and fine jewellery.

Modernization:
Lately the most important forward step Jaipur has taken, is modernization of both the gems and jewellery industries. It started manufacturing colored gems in calibrated sizes to meet overseas demand. Ultrasonic machines were inducted into the bead-making industry. Semi-automatic production in other sections of the gems sector followed. A very important development in this respect is that today Jaipur is not only using modern machines but is also manufacturing some of them.