Munnu Kasliwal, a Favorite Jeweler of Connoisseurs, Dies at 54

Palani Mohan/Getty Images

Munnu Kasliwal, the owner of Gem Palace, in Jaipur India.

From an old mansion on Mirza Ismail Road in Jaipur, India, the jeweler Munnu Kasliwal presided over an unlikely global empire. To the broader public Mr. Kasliwal's name was not nearly as familiar as those of Cartier or Harry Winston, but his family-owned emporium, the Gem Palace, has for decades been a valued secret passed along via word of mouth by international connoisseurs.

Collected by European royals, Italian designers, Arab sheiks, international society queens and the merely moneyed, who could find his designs for sale at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Neue Galerie in Manhattan as well as at Barneys New York, Mr. Kasliwal's baubles were also particular favorites of celebrities, whom he cultivated with unassuming charm.

Stars like Nicole Kidman were drawn to the dazzling and sometimes monumental gems Mr. Kasliwal set in audacious mounts. Undaunted by either rocks or bold effects, he strung precious stones as casually as pop beads. For a Vogue cover, a double-strand Gem Palace necklace snaked across Ms. Kidman's bare back in a gesture both elegant and punk, as though she'd been draped in glistening bicycle chains.

Mr. Kasliwal died on Aug. 23 in Jaipur. He was 54. The cause was brain cancer, his son Siddharth said.

Born in Jaipur on July 7, 1958, and educated at St. Xavier's Senior Secondary School, a private Jesuit high school, and at the University of Rajasthan, Mr. Kasliwal might have seemed predestined for his vocation. By the time he came along, his family had already plied the jewelry trade for six generations. Yet he had no formal training as a jeweler and first obtained a degree in business management before joining the family business, started, as he sometimes said, by an ancestor who sold gems to the Mughal courts.

Whether this was fact or fancy, a marked affinity for the opulence of the Mughal era became a hallmark of Mr. Kasliwal's style.

“Gem Palace was like the den of Ali Baba, and you could never leave with empty hands,” said the designer and socialite Muriel Brandolini. “Unlike certain famous jewelers who act like it's a favor for them to open the door, he was a seducer - of men, women and children. He could intuitively understand the personality of a person and capture it in the designs.” His work, said Julie Gilhart, the former fashion director of Barneys New York, was “spectacularly rich in technique and heritage.”

An eclecticist, Mr. Kasliwal drew inspiration equally from geomorphic Modernist forms and India's rich though occasionally fusty jewelry traditions. Knowing that virtually anything he dreamed of could be realized by the skilled craftsmen in his workrooms in Jaipur, he both flouted and enlarged the conventions of his craft, designing pearl torsades that knotted like bolos, earrings with gems mounted on miniature springs so that they quivered, and variations of the opulent kundan sets that barnacle Indian brides.  

Mr. Kasliwal developed his affinity for nature's rarest minerals in childhood, when he was given sacks of semiprecious gemstones to play with, and he readily shared his delight with visitors to the Gem Palace in India and his velvet-upholstered showroom on East 74th Street in Manhattan.

Beckoned into a private chamber at the Gem Palace in Jaipur, clients were invited to pull up chairs while Mr. Kasliwal, dressed in his customary white linen kurta, sat cross-legged before a cloth-covered table and spilled onto it the contents of small cotton sacks. As casually as though he were cleaning grains of rice, he sifted through his fingers Colombian emeralds, pigeon blood rubies, old-mine diamonds, tourmalines, citrines, labradorite or pearls.

In addition to his son Siddharth, Mr. Kasliwal is survived by his mother, Vimla Kasliwal; his wife, Kalpana; another son, Samarth; and his brothers, Sudhir and Sanjay.

Mr. Kasliwal reveled in sleuth work, pursuing great stones at international salesrooms and gem fairs as well as in the now-depleted treasuries of princely families.

Once, in pursuit of an old gem from the mines of Golconda, he drove through the deeply potholed roads of the impoverished state of Bihar, risking automotive disaster and highway robbery, to reach the palace of an erstwhile nobleman.

When at last he arrived and the palm-size gem was produced from a dirty old cloth, it was a dull disappointment. “It looked like a hunk of glass,” Mr. Kasliwal said.

Experience and instinct guided him to bring the diamond outdoors, where, by the rays of the setting sun, the subtly faceted old stone revealed itself.

“That is why people shouldn't hide their jewels away in vaults or save them for special occasions,” Mr. Kasliwal said. Having been freed from the grasp of the earth, he explained, “gems only come alive in the light.”