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A Century Before the First Lab Grown Diamond Was Cut

Sometime around 1915–16, a young man from a land-owning family in Haryana left everything familiar and made his way to Hyderabad — a city already famous across the subcontinent for its pearls, precious stones, and the extraordinary wealth of the Nizams. His name was Tibarumal Gupta, and his decision to enter the jewellery trade in a city he had no roots in was, by any measure, a risk.

By 1920, he had launched a jewellery firm that would outlast most businesses of its era. He became known for pieces that were lavish without being clumsy — exquisitely designed, handcrafted, and sought after by the city’s most discerning patrons. The reputation grew quickly enough that he became the preferred jeweller of the 7th Nizam of Hyderabad, Osman Ali Pasha. Serving the Nizam’s court wasn’t simply a commercial milestone; it gave the house an intimate education in refined royal taste and pushed the artisans to develop a sophistication in design and gemstone evaluation that most jewellers never encounter.

That foundation — built on precision, trust, and an almost obsessive attention to how a stone sits in its setting — is the same foundation Elevé Diamonds stands on today, more than a century later.

Three Generations of Design Before the Fourth Reimagined Everything

The Tibarumal story passed through generations the way good craft tends to: each inheritor kept what worked and pushed further into what was possible. Rambharos Gupta, one of Tibarumal’s sons, expanded the venture beyond Charminar and began developing the distinctive design language the house became known for. His son, Pankaj Gupta, took creative direction from 1988 onward, introducing modern design ideas while keeping gemstones — their quality, their cut, their character — at the centre of every piece. Under Pankaj’s direction, the house moved from Basheerbagh to Banjara Hills, tracking the city’s own shift toward a wealthier, design-conscious clientele.

Pankaj also introduced something that would prove important for the next generation: 3D CAD design. Where the family had once shown customers hand-drawn sketches, they began letting people visualise finished jewellery in three dimensions before a single gram of gold was poured. This wasn’t decoration; it was a shift in how the house thought about the relationship between craft and the customer’s imagination.

Then came Trishank Gupta, the fourth generation. The moment that clarified his direction for Elevé Diamonds came from a single client interaction: a woman brought in a diamond she had purchased elsewhere. When Trishank examined it, he realised it was lab-grown — and the jeweller who had sold it to her had no idea. That gap between what the industry was producing and what customers actually understood about it struck him as both a problem and an opening. He spent the following period studying how to source the best lab-grown diamonds and how to make them genuinely accessible, without the opacity that had surrounded the category.

What ‘Artisans Trained in Tibarumal’s Lineage’ Actually Means

Elevé Diamonds launched in 2025 with flagship stores in Kokapet, Kompally, and Warangal, with further domestic and international expansion already planned for 2026. The brand is led by Trishank Gupta alongside Prajay Maganlal, with design direction continuing under Pankaj Gupta — meaning the creative sensibility that shaped Tibarumal’s most celebrated pieces directly informs what Elevé puts in its cases.

The diamonds themselves are grown using CVD (Chemical Vapor Deposition) technology, each stone precision-cut and IGI-certified. But the part that separates Elevé from generic lab-grown retailers is what happens after the diamond is grown: the settings are handcrafted by artisans who trained within Tibarumal’s lineage. That phrase carries specific weight. These are craftspeople who learned their trade inside a house that spent decades serving royal patrons, that moved locations as the city’s taste evolved, and that built its reputation on the idea that trust is not a marketing claim but a practice.

The collections reflect this directly. The Nizam line draws on royal motifs from the very court that shaped Tibarumal’s original aesthetic. The Victorian Polki interpretations translate a 19th-century European sensibility through the lens of Indian goldsmithing. Coloured stone pieces reimagine traditional designs for buyers who want something that feels rooted without feeling museum-bound. Each of these directions is available across Elevé’s diamond rings, diamond earrings, necklaces, and pendants — the full range of forms that fine jewellery takes in daily Indian life.

One practical consequence of this heritage is worth noting for buyers: the Tibarumal house built its long-term reputation on a minimum ticket size that started at around ₹5 lakh at the legacy store. Elevé was conceived specifically to make the same quality of design and craftsmanship accessible to a much wider range of customers — young professionals, couples planning destination weddings who don’t want to travel with pieces worth crores, families looking for everyday diamonds that hold their quality over years of wear.

Why Heritage Matters More in Lab Grown Diamonds, Not Less

There’s a reasonable question buried in all of this: does legacy actually matter when the diamond is grown in a controlled environment rather than pulled from the earth? The answer is probably yes — and more so than most people expect.

The technical specifications of a CVD diamond are verifiable. IGI certification tells you the cut grade, colour, clarity, and carat weight. What certification cannot tell you is whether the person who set the stone understood how light moves through a marquise cut at different angles, or whether the prongs holding a solitaire will wear well over decades of daily use. That knowledge lives in craft traditions, and craft traditions live in lineages — in the relationship between a master artisan and the apprentices who learned by watching and correcting and trying again.

This is precisely the gap that most lab-grown diamond brands in India have not yet closed. The category has grown fast enough that many entrants have focused on the stone’s provenance story — ethical, above-ground, conflict-free — without building the design and setting expertise that makes jewellery worth keeping for a generation. Elevé Diamonds enters the category from the opposite direction: the craftsmanship infrastructure came first, built over a century, and the lab-grown diamond technology was layered on top of it.

The result is a brand that can honestly claim both sides of what modern jewellery buyers in Hyderabad are looking for. The ethical and sustainability credentials are real — IGI-certified, CVD-grown, no mining, no conflict supply chains. And the craft credentials are equally real, traceable to a house that was setting diamonds for the Nizam’s court before most of today’s jewellery brands existed.

For anyone in Hyderabad considering a lab grown diamond engagement ring or a significant piece for a wedding or milestone occasion, the question isn’t just whether the diamond is certified. It’s whether the hands that shaped the piece around it knew what they were doing. At Elevé, that question has a century-long answer.