On a cool January evening in 2026, the Los Angeles premiere of Wuthering Heights unfolded in all its gauche glory, with flashing lights and velvet ropes. The lead actress, Margot Robbie, stepped onto the carpet in a custom Schiaparelli gown that billowed beautifully, but it was the jewel at her throat that held the room’s breath: a heart-shaped diamond pendant suspended on a Cartier chain of gold, rubies, and diamonds. The piece, valued at roughly $8 million, gleamed beautifully and several pictures were clicked; headlines the next morning called it “Elizabeth Taylor’s iconic Taj Mahal necklace,” a romantic heirloom gifted to Taylor by Richard Burton in 1972. Yet etched into the diamond itself, in elegant Parsee script, are words far older: “Love is Everlasting,” followed by the name and title of Nur Jahan; empress, poet, and the jewel’s first documented owner around 1627-28.
The inscription is not subtle. It names Nur Jahan directly, and the pendant was a personal gift from Mughal Emperor Jahangir to his beloved wife, a woman who ruled alongside him, struck coinage in her name, and shaped Mughal aesthetics during one of India’s most opulent eras. From there the diamond traveled to their son Shah Jahan, who gave it to Mumtaz Mahal; her death inspired the ivory-marble monument we know as the Taj Mahal. Somewhere between Mughal treasuries and the thefts of colonisation the chain of custody grows shadowy: Cartier acquired and remounted the pendant in the early 1970s under circumstances historians describe as “murky,” with no transparent record of how a 17th-century imperial artifact left the subcontinent at all. Yet when Robbie wore it, the narrative contracted to Hollywood: Burton and Taylor’s tempestuous love story became the headline.
When Hollywood Gets to Tell the Story
This is not merely a question of attribution. It invites us to ask: why does the white-owned chapter eclipse the origin? Mainstream coverage: Vogue, Town & Country, People, all framed the necklace as an extension of Old Hollywood glamour. Robbie herself described it on the carpet as “Elizabeth Taylor’s necklace” and linked it to “the woman whose grave is the Taj Mahal” (a reference to Mumtaz Mahal, not Nur Jahan). The slippage feels almost inevitable within a longer pattern: Western media and luxury houses consistently recenter themselves as the rightful inheritors of non-Western splendor. Social media erupted in response: Instagram reels, Reddit threads, and X posts calling the jewel “stolen,” pointing to Cartier’s history of acquiring South Asian artifacts without clear provenance and its alleged reluctance to loan pieces to Indian artists (Diljit Dosanjh being denied the Patiala jewels by Cartier during the Met Gala 2025 was also referenced in this context) while readily providing them to white celebrities.
The White Gaze and the “Exotic” Indian Woman
In my view, the incident points to a broader issue: the white gaze’s exoticization of Indian women and their cultural inheritance. Nur Jahan was no passive muse, yet in 2026, her name is overshadowed by two white icons of romance. This mirrors how Indian femininity itself is consumed in global fashion and media: reduced to bindis at music festivals, henna as “boho” temporary tattoos, saris reimagined as “fusion” gowns on Western runways. The “Indian girl” becomes a fantasy palette, she is mystical, sensual, spiritually available, for white women to borrow as a marker of edge or enlightenment, while actual Indian and South Asian women navigate stereotypes that paint them as perpetually “other,” too ethnic when they claim the same elements unapologetically.
Fashion has always been a ledger of power. Luxury brands profit from motifs, be it paisley, block prints, Mughal jaali patterns, that have been directly lifted from Indian artisans whose labor remains underpaid and uncredited. Fast fashion has accelerated the cycle, flooding markets with machine-made versions while rivers in textile hubs like Tirupur choke on dye. Meanwhile, high-profile moments like Robbie’s premiere romanticize the artifact without even an acknowledgement of where it came from.
Provenance, or the Art of Forgetting?
I also want to raise questions about provenance– how many such pieces in Western collections are unapologetic colonial plunder? Museums like the Victoria and Albert in London house thousands of Indian artifacts acquired during the Raj, through coercion or outright theft, yet they’re displayed proudly as benevolent acquisitions. Cartier’s remounting of the Taj Mahal diamond in 1971, just as decolonization movements gained ground, feels utterly emblematic: a French luxury house polishing an Indian gem for a new market, its origins conveniently blurred.
It is truly a shame, for historical accounts of Nur Jahan, drawn from Mughal chronicles like the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, portray her as a sharpshooter, a diplomat, even a hunter who felled tigers– far from the delicate exoticism Western narratives impose. Yet in fashion discourse, Indian women’s legacies are softened into aesthetics: the empress becomes a backdrop for a diamond’s sparkle, much like how contemporary South Asian designers are mined for inspiration but rarely centered in global conversations. Why, in 2026, does a jewel inscribed with an Indian empress’s name become “Taylor’s” alone? The answer lies in the old playbook of orientalism: the East as eternal supplier of wonder, the West as its discerning curator.
Neither Lamp Nor Rose
The diamond still carries Nur Jahan’s name, cut carefully into its surface, surviving centuries of transfer, remounting, and renaming. Jehangir had her name inscribed, and it would be a great disservice to forget that. Even as the Hindu right in India vacillates between repudiating the Mughals entirely and burning with anger at the spectacle of colonial theft, the jewel remains suspended in these contradictions. Beyond the arguments over repatriation, beyond the endless reassignment of ownership and meaning, the diamond has acquired new lives, new legends, new wearers. Ultimately, Nur Jahan’s name, like the love in her pendant is everlasting, and she left her own last words after all:
“On the grave of this poor stranger, let there be neither lamp nor rose,
Let neither butterfly’s wing burn nor nightingale sing.”
— Nur Jahan’s epitaph, inscribed on her tomb in Lahore