Kundan is technically a setting, not a stone. The word refers to the highest grade of refined gold — 24-karat, hammered into thin foils to hold stones in place without prongs. The technique originated in Mughal courts of the sixteenth century and traveled with the empire into every regional jewellery tradition it touched.
Three working masters today represent three distinct lineages. In Jaipur, a third-generation studio in Johri Bazaar still uses the same patterns hand-cut into wax that the family patriarch developed in 1974. In Hyderabad, a single workshop near the Charminar has been making kundan for the Nizami descendants for four generations, and refuses to take work from designers who haven’t been introduced by a family elder. In Pune, a contemporary studio of seven craftspeople has begun pairing kundan with lab-grown diamonds and platinum bases — a choice that has earned both praise and excommunication, depending on the dinner table.
What unites the three is technical discipline. What divides them is what they think kundan is for. The Jaipur studio treats kundan as inheritance: a fixed vocabulary, perfected. The Hyderabad workshop treats it as continuation: each piece an entry in an ongoing court tradition. The Pune contemporary treats it as language: kundan as a way of speaking, not a thing to be said.