When Margot Robbie walked the red carpet for the Wuthering Heights premiere in LA, she wasn’t just wearing couture and gothic glam vibes — she was wearing 400 years of empire, extraction and very expensive feelings around her neck.
We are, of course, talking about the headline-making Cartier necklace that once belonged to Elizabeth Taylor, estimated to be worth roughly US $ 8 million (approx. $12 million AUD). Margot said she “felt like it had a lot of romantic history and felt appropriate for tonight”, and she’s not wrong. Richard Burton famously gave the 69.42-carat diamond to his on-again, off-again wife Elizabeth Taylor in 1969, later fashioning it into a necklace to hide her tracheotomy scar at the 1970 Oscars.
However, the Liz and Richard era is basically the final act of a saga that starts in India and passes through colonisation, plunder, and a US $7 million ($11 million AUD) legal battle. And once again, Indian stories are being flattened for white celebrities.
Let’s dive in.
The main event, though, wasn’t the dress, it was the necklace glinting at her throat — Elizabeth Taylor’s so‑called Taj Mahal diamond, now set in a Cartier gold, ruby and diamond chain and valued around the $8 – 9 million (roughly $13.5 million AUD) mark.
On the carpet, Margot said the piece “felt like it had a lot of romantic history and felt appropriate for tonight,” tying it neatly to Wuthering Heights, that famously healthy depiction of love, obsession and generational trauma. She’s not wrong that it’s romantic. It’s just that the love story most outlets reached for — Liz and Richard Burton — is basically the final act of a saga that starts in 17th century India and passes through colonisation, plunder and a US$7 million ($12 million AUD) legal battle.
Before Elizabeth Taylor, there was Nur Jahan
The pendant Margot wore isn’t just an actress’ necklace. It first belonged to Nur Jahan, the influential wife of Mughal emperor Jahangir, who received it as a royal gift in the 1600s.
It’s a heart‑shaped, table‑cut Indian diamond — a style that trades sparkle for a flat surface you can literally write on.Across that surface is an inscription in Persian nasta‘liq script with three details: Nur Jahan Begum Padshah’s name, the number 23 (for Jahangir’s 23rd year on the throne), and the Hijri date 1037, placing it around 1627–1628. I
n the Mughal court, gems like this weren’t just “nice things” — they acted like documents, recording ownership, relationships and memory. This diamond was designed to be read, not just admired.
After Jahangir’s death, the jewel passed to his son, Shah Jahan. He gave it to his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, whose death inspired him to commission the Taj Mahal. It’s why Western scholars sometimes refer to it as the Taj Mahal diamond — although, as we’ll get to, that says more about branding than about where it actually came from.
What happened next isn’t fully documented, but most historians believe the pendant stayed within the Mughal treasury, moving between emperors rather than disappearing into private hands.
From Mughal court to Budapest birthday party
So how does a diamond like that go from the Mughal court to a Hollywood red carpet?
Historians have never uncovered the full truth, but the most likely explanation is that it left India during Nadir Shah of Persia’s 1739 sack of Delhi. His forces looted the Mughal treasury, with countless pieces entering collections across Europe and Russia via opaque, private sales. A couple centuries later, Cartier acquires it — and that’s where the white washing starts.
Exactly how Cartier acquired the jewel is also somewhat mysterious, although a 1971 report from the New York Times claims it came from the collection of a Mrs Robert H. Kenmore, whose husband had a controlling interested in Cartier at the time. It’s partly why you’ll read the diamond’s history smoothed over in write ups as having “found its way to Elizabeth and Richard”, as though it called an Uber from Agra to New York. The provenance has holes, and there’s nothing like a celebrity love story to cover them up.
By the 20th century, the pendant showed up in Cartier’s orbit, hanging from a traditional silk cord more in line with South Asian wearing styles than Paris runways. In 1971, Cartier designer Alfred Durante swapped the cord out for a woven gold chain set with cabochon rubies and old mine‑cut diamonds, carefully echoing the flow of fabric while recoding it as high European luxury. Same object, new audience.
In 1972, Cartier’s president Michael Thomas presented the necklace to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton during a layover at Kennedy Airport, after Burton asks for ideas for a Valentine’s Day and 40th‑birthday gift.
Burton later surprises Taylor with the piece in Budapest for her 40th, while he was filming Bluebeard. Under Taylor, the diamond became something like a Hollywood archive object and made its way into the Burton‑Taylor mythology — another symbol of their intense, messy, two‑time marriage. But none of that erases the earlier layers. It just stacks another narrative on top.
When an “eternal love” diamond ends up in court
After Taylor’s death, the necklace goes to auction at Christie’s in 2011 as part of the mega‑sale of her jewellery. It’s estimated at US$300,000 – US$500,000 (around $450,000 – $745,000 AUD), but the story Taj Mahal, Mughal romance, Liz and Dick, “eternal love” clearly hits, because it sells for US$8.8 million (around $13 million AUD)and breaks records for Indian jewellery at the time.
Then the buyer gets nervous.
Soon after, the new owner questions whether the diamond is actually from the Mughal period as strongly implied and pushes to undo the sale. Christie’s agrees to cancel the deal and asks the Elizabeth Taylor Trust to return more than US$7 million ($12 million AUD) of the proceeds. The trust is like, ‘absolutely not’, and a long, messy legal fight kicks off.
Eventually, the dispute is settled, but the whole saga makes one thing really clear: this diamond’s value is held up by stories as much as stones. Romance, yes. But also catalogue language, press releases, and how much trust people put in the institutions selling those stories.
Cartier, culture and who gets to wear the past
If your For You Page is anything like mine or you simply have brown friends, you’re probably across the general frustration. Cartier loaning Margot Robbie the diamond is the latest in a long line of white celebrities securing access to Indian history, while Indian celebrities are kept out.
Think about the Patiala necklace: originally made by Cartier in 1928 for Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala, stacked with thousands of diamonds and Burmese rubies, it vanished after 1948 and later resurfaced in a diminished state at Cartier, where it was partially reconstructed. Fast‑forward to the Met Gala: in 2022, Emma Chamberlain wears a Cartier choker believed to be part of that historic Patiala set. A white American influencer gets to be dripping in a piece originally made for an Indian royal family.
When Punjabi singer Diljit Dosanjh’s team reportedly asked Cartier to borrow the original Patiala necklace for his own Met Gala appearance later, the brand allegedly refused, saying it was kept under “museum conditions”, so he wore inspired jewellery instead. The optics of a white influencer in the heirloom and a Punjabi superstar in the replica of jewellery from his own region sparked understandable anger in South Asian and diasporic circles.
So when Margot, a white Australian actor, steps out in one of the few surviving Mughal jewels whose importance lies as much in its inscription and documentation as in its sparkle, it sits inside a pattern: Cartier controls how these pieces come into view and whose bodies are allowed to host them. South Asian people mostly get to see their historical objects when they’re on loan to someone else.
Romance, backlash and the Wuthering Heights of it all
None of this is a personal attack on Margot Robbie. She’s still our Aussie diva and we are literally both Gold Coast girls. Her Wuthering Heights press looks have been consistently fun, considered and thematically smart. She’s said she chose the Taj Mahal diamond because it felt full of “romantic history” and made sense for a story built on obsessive love. That’s a thoughtful styling choice, not a careless one.
But the way everyone talks around the necklace matters. Most write‑ups have leaned heavily into the Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton chapter — their affair on Cleopatra, their chaotic marriages, the Budapest birthday surprise. But they tend to gloss over the Mughal backstory or compress it into one vague sentence. The centuries of silent ownership get reduced to phrases like “eventually entered Taylor’s collection” or “found its way” to Hollywood.
As this TikTok from digital indie publication The Juggernaut points out, some coverage of the necklace also makes basic mistakes that further cloud the jewel’s history. (FWIW, the engraving is not “Parsee”, it’s Farsi/Persian.)
Meanwhile, South Asian writers and creators are the ones doing the labour of filling in the gaps, explaining Nur Jahan’s power, decoding the inscription, and pointing out how often heritage jewellery from the subcontinent only appears in public when draped on white women at Western events. It’s a bit rich to keep talking about “eternal love” while sidestepping the people and histories the object originally belonged to.
Emerald Fennell is already copping backlash for casting Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, a character many readers and scholars see as a racialised outsider. Even if you want to debate how exactly we’d describe him now, plenty of people viewed Heathcliff as a rare, clear‑cut chance to put a person of colour in a big Gothic lead. Instead, that opportunity just… slipped by.
The irony is almost too on‑the‑nose. Wuthering Heights is about obsession, class, race, and people being haunted by what was done to them and by them. The Taj Mahal diamond is a haunted object: it still carries Nur Jahan’s name, the dates, the marks of empire, the fingerprints of auction houses and lawyers. The inscription is still there, insisting on where it came from, even when the story told on top of it keeps changing.
Enjoying the fashion isn’t the problem. I’m enjoying the fashion. I love that Margot went this hard for a premiere. The problem is when our idea of “romantic history” stops at Liz and Dick and refuses to zoom out. Because if a single diamond can hold four centuries of receipts on its surface, the least we can do, especially those of us who grew up in the shadow of empire, is read more than the last chapter.
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