There is a fact about the diamond industry that most jewellers in the western world have never told their clients. Not because it is a secret exactly - but because it is inconvenient to a story that prefers diamonds to feel European, American, or at least vaguely stateless.

Here it is: nine out of every ten diamonds you have ever seen - on your grandmother's ring, in a Tiffany window, on the finger of a bride at a wedding you attended - were cut, shaped, faceted, and polished in one city.

That city is Surat, India. Population 6.5 million. Located in the state of Gujarat on India's western coast. A port city with ancient roots and an extraordinary modern story.

And it is the city where Stara's founder, Dev Katrodiya, grew up. Where his family has worked for over forty years. Where the diamonds in your ring were almost certainly born into their final form.

India Was Always the Beginning

Source: GIA

Before Brazil. Before South Africa. Before Russia or Botswana or Canada discovered diamonds underground, there was India. For thousands of years - stretching back as far as the 4th century BC and possibly earlier - India was the only place on earth where diamonds had ever been found.

They came from the alluvial riverbeds of what is now Andhra Pradesh - along the Penner, the Krishna, and the Godavari rivers, in a region centred on a fortress city called Golconda. Not a mine in the modern industrial sense, but vast stretches of riverbed where diamonds, carried by water over millennia, could be found by those patient enough to look.

For the better part of two thousand years, every diamond that entered European courts, Ottoman treasuries, Persian thrones, and Mughal emperors' collections came from these rivers. The Hope Diamond. The Koh-i-Noor. The Regent. The Orlov. The Darya-i-Noor. Some of history's most famous stones in existence are Golconda diamonds - and every single one began in the soil of India.

In the 1720s, Brazilian miners stumbled upon alluvial diamond deposits, ending India's global monopoly for the first time in recorded history. South Africa followed in the 1860s with deposits that dwarfed anything found before. By the turn of the 20th century, India's role as a diamond source had become a footnote.

But India's role in diamonds was far from over. It was simply about to change completely.

How Surat Became the Cutting Capital of the World

In the early 1900s, diamond cutting was done primarily in Antwerp and Amsterdam - European centres with centuries of craft tradition and the infrastructure to match. Surat at this point was a trading port, known for its textile industry and its history as a gateway for merchants, but not yet for diamonds.

The shift began quietly. A group of entrepreneurs from the Patel and Jain community of Gujarat - a community known for its business acumen and tight-knit networks - saw an opportunity. Diamond rough was flowing out of Africa. European cutting was expensive. Skilled artisan hands in Gujarat were available. Slowly, a cutting industry began to form.

Then came World War II - and with it, an unexpected accelerant. Before 1940, a significant portion of diamond cutting had been done in Rangoon, Burma (now Myanmar). When Japanese forces invaded Burma in the early 1940s, the diamond craftsmen there - many of them of Indian origin - returned home to Gujarat. They brought their tools, their skills, and their expertise with them. Surat absorbed them, and the industry grew faster.

In the 1960s, the Indian government made a decisive move: it opened the official import and export of rough and polished diamonds. The floodgates opened. International traders from Africa, Australia, and beyond began shipping their rough diamonds to Surat for cutting. The economics were unambiguous - skilled craftsmanship, lower costs, and a growing ecosystem of related industries made Surat the obvious choice.

By the 1980s, what had begun as a cottage industry of small workshops had become a city-defining force. By the 2000s, Surat had cut 92% of the world's diamonds by piece count. Today, that figure sits at around 90% - with roughly 1.5 million people employed directly or indirectly in the industry, across more than 100,000 cutting and polishing units, from vast modern factories to family workshops.

The Surat Diamond Bourse: The Largest Building on Earth

In December 2023, Surat opened something that few people outside the industry have heard of - but that tells you everything about how seriously India takes its diamond dominance.

The Surat Diamond Bourse is the world's largest office building. Not the tallest. The largest - by total floor area. Spread across 35 acres with 67,000 square metres of trading floor space, 4,500 offices, and space for more than 65,000 diamond professionals, it was designed to consolidate Surat's position as the global centre of the diamond trade - not just the cutting hub, but the trading hub too.

Inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on December 17, 2023, it represents a declaration: India intends to own not just the craft of diamonds, but the commerce of them.

Why Most People Never Hear This Story

Here is the honest question: if nine out of ten of the world's diamonds are cut in Surat, why do most people buying diamonds in London, New York, or Toronto have no idea?

The answer is partly the nature of the industry. Diamonds travel a long chain from mine to retailer - rough stone, cutter, polisher, grader, wholesaler, jeweller, consumer. By the time a diamond reaches a display case, its journey through Surat is invisible. The brand name on the box is rarely Indian.

But there is something more than that. The western luxury industry has, for most of its history, found it more comfortable to locate diamond expertise in Antwerp, Geneva, or New York rather than Gujarat. It makes a better story for a certain kind of consumer. It is also, by every measurable fact, simply incorrect.

The skill, the precision, and the volume are in Surat. They have been for decades. The world's most famous jewellery brands know it - which is why their stones spend time there before they end up in any brand's workshop.

Forty Years on the Cutting Floor

Before there was Stara Designs, there was a boy growing up in Surat in a home where diamonds were simply part of life. Not treasures kept in a safe. Not abstract luxury. Just the daily texture of a family that had spent over forty years learning to coax brilliance from rough stone.

Dev Katrodiya's father owned a cutting & polishing facility. Dev would visit the factory. Watch the craftsmen. Learn, without being formally taught, what it takes to look at a rough stone and understand what it is trying to become. He collected discarded imitation stones as a child and kept them not for their value, but for what they represented. The idea that something could be transformed into something extraordinary.

That childhood - in that city, in that household - is the foundation that Stara was built on. When Dev crossed an ocean and came to Kelowna, British Columbia, he brought that heritage with him. The access to his family's cutting expertise in Surat. The relationships built over four decades. The knowledge of what a truly fine stone looks like before it ever reaches a display case.

This is what Dev has to offer, trust, taste and access. Any jeweller can source a certified diamond. Very few can pick up a phone and speak to the people who cut it.

What This Means For Your Ring

When you commission a piece with Stara, you are not simply choosing a design from a catalogue and waiting for it to arrive. You are accessing a supply chain that most independent jewellers in Canada cannot reach.

Custom cuts - the 100+ shapes we can offer beyond the standard ten - are possible because of Surat. Specific stone selections, sourced to your requirements rather than whatever happens to be available, are possible because of Surat. The ability to offer both natural and lab-grown diamonds at exceptional quality and price is possible because the cutting floor is not a distant abstraction but a family relationship.

The most famous diamonds in the world came from India. The vast majority of all diamonds in the world are still shaped there. When you choose Stara, you are not buying a diamond from a store. You are, in a very real sense, going directly to the source.

That is the story most jewellers will never tell you. We just did.

 

Sources: https://adiamondisforever.com/en-in/education/a-look-at-the-rich-history-of-diamonds-in-india/

https://www.gia.edu/diamonds-ancient-india-reading-list

https://adiamondisforever.com/en-in/education/how-surat-became-the-diamond-capital-of-the-world/

Your story, set in stone.

Learn more about our journey at staradesigns.ca/our-journey