Hanut Singh: 'My jewelry is for people who already have jewelry'
Singh's grandmother Princess Karam (L), photographed by Cecil Beaton; Hanut Singh earrings and the designer (R).For contemporary New Delhi jewelry designer Hanut Singh, the world of maharajas and maharanis has a special personal resonance.
A descendant of a unique royal Indian heritage, in his design work Singh blends the past with the present, East with West, tradition with au courant style to create elegantly restrained, exquisitely crafted heirloom jewelry.
After a long gap, he returns to Mumbai for a two-day trunk show at Bungalow 8 this week, February 4-6.
In just a few short years of designing, Singh has gained a cult following among not just Hollywood celebrities and New York socialites, but also Indian cognoscenti.
From clients such as the Olsen twins to Wendi Murdoch, there’s something in a Hanut Singh piece that traverses generations. Whether you’re a modern day queen like Queen Rania of Jordan or bohemian-styled fashion designer Malini Ramani from New Delhi, there's something in a Hanut Singh creation that traverses cultures and lifestyles.
Largely eschewing big, fancy stones, Singh prefers crafting and juxtaposing disparate elements, mixing up semi-precious with precious, drawing upon his grandfather’s kirpan to fashion dagger earrings, encrusting abalone shell with cabochon stones to fashion pendants or producing a Nathdwara pendant in a current context.
As Maithili Ahluwalia, Bungalow 8’s culturally savvy proprietor explains: “Hanut's work is Indian without wearing the ‘made in India’ label on its sleeve. He is a designer like few others who is spoken about globally without his Indianness as a prefix.”
Singh concedes that he doesn’t consider himself an Indian designer.
“I am a jewelry designer, with an Indian bent but a global aesthetic,” is his tagline of choice.
Modern maharajas
There are probably very few Indians, let alone Indian jewelery designers, who could claim as vivid and as stylish a lineage.
Singh’s great grandfather was Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala (1872-1949), who, according to the book "Maharajas Jewels" by Katherine Prior and John Adamson, “was one of the princes most in evidence in the jewelry showrooms of Europe, a tall elegant man of charming manners ... perfectly at ease in France and England.”
And although Kapurthala was a tiny state of 630 square miles, with a population of 300,000, and not especially rich compared to other Indian princely states, Jagatjit Singh’s frequents trips to Europe and the United States, his love of jewels, especially those created in Paris by Boucheron and Cartier, gave both the maharaja and his kingdom a great measure of fame.
Equally celebrated was Hanut’s paternal grandmother, Sita Devi, wife of Jagatjit Singh’s younger son, Karamjit, who cut a stylish swath across the world with her divine looks, charm and spectacular jewels.
Muse to photographers like Cecil Beaton and Man Ray, Princess Karam, as she was known, was multilingual and elegant to a fault: dressed in Mainbocher and Madame Gres, she and her husband were, as Singh puts it: "haut soigne," or highly polished.
In 1937, Diana Vreeland requested the couple to open up their home to her then magazine, "Harper’s Bazaar." They did, and the photographs are in the family’s private albums.
In 1939, Elsie de Wolfe, aka Lady Mendl, threw a fabulous party in the princess's honor, replete with trained elephants.
“My grandfather was a true connoisseur," says Singh. "He would buy jewelry for my grandmother. The 1920s and 1930s were huge for India in terms of jewelry. Incredible loose stones were taken abroad to the great jewelry houses, who hadn’t encountered stones of such varying majesty.
"You don’t get stones like that anymore. The refinement and quality, they don’t exist. And in return, there started this whole eastern movement of jewelry design, the magic of design with Indian stones set in a European and Indian way at the same time.
"I feel proud to say that my great grandfather was a pioneer.”
An education
Given this pedigree and culture to dip in to, Singh makes a very wise choice of career. Though he never trained formally in jewelery design, he learned by watching.
“The nicest part for me, a part that was pivotal in my growth and understanding of jewelry, was the fact that my grandmother and my mother would wear these spectacular heirlooms all the time. They were things to be worn everyday, or occasionally, but to be worn rather than locked up in vaults.
"To see what stones matched with others, the interplay of color, the way settings were perfected, the idea of a piece and its evolution, the harmony of stone and setting, the creativity of European ideas mixed with Indian -- all this led to my education of my craft.”
According to the designer, the Hanut Singh woman is someone who already has a strong sense of personal style, and is passionate about jewelry.
He once said that his jewelry was "for people who already have jewelry."
“My point of view is strong and I feel that it’s a sophisticated aesthetic that appeals to a more grown woman. Those who have a passion for jewelry get the idea more quickly.”
He says he wants to be a "free bird," and therefore works only via private appointment or select trunk shows across the world.
Hanut’s newest collection, on show at Bungalow 8 this weekend, is a colorful collection called 'Technotronic,' priced at Rs 60,000 and upwards.
