The Museum
The family
Four generations of the Dhaddha family in Jaipur, one collection, a jewellery house and a museum that stands inside its own atelier.
Four generations
The first generation gave a sixteen-year-old boy two silver hookah mouthpieces. The second, Gyan Chand Dhaddha, spent five decades collecting and founded the family jewellery house, Gem Plaza, in the 1980s. The third, his sons Suresh and Arun, built the museum and opened it. The fourth founded GYAN Jaipur in 2017 and answers the museum’s visitor reviews.
Why there is a showroom next door
The museum stands inside the Gem Plaza atelier complex in Sitapura, where the family employs some two hundred craftspeople. That is why visitors describe a jewellery showroom beside the galleries, and why one reviewer said plainly that a museum is not a shop and the two should be separated. The arrangement is a fact of the site, and worth stating before you arrive rather than after: the galleries are a museum, the salon is a business, and nobody is required to enter the second in order to see the first.
Three things, one address
The museum, the atelier and the brand share a site and a family, and are not the same institution. This page links to the other two so that a reader who wants the jewellery can find it, and a reader who wants the museum is not sold anything.
Gem Plaza
The family’s jewellery house, founded by the collector, with a retail shop on MI Road and the atelier in Sitapura that the museum stands in.
Gem Plaza, the Dhaddha family’s jewellery house in Jaipur
Gem Plaza is not Gem Palace. Gem Palace is a different and older Jaipur house, and search results conflate the two constantly.
GYAN Jaipur
The contemporary jewellery brand founded by the fourth generation in 2017, whose collections are drawn from the objects in this museum. It is shown in a salon within the same complex and launched in the United States in 2023.
Who does what
Gyan Chand Dhaddha
Founder
Gyan Chand Dhaddha (1940–2004) is described by the museum as a naturalist, a collector and gemmologist. At sixteen his father gave him two jewelled silver hookah mouthpieces; he collected for five decades afterwards. The museum that carries his name opened in 2016, twelve years after his death, and is built on what he assembled.
Suresh Dhaddha
Co-founder
The elder son of the founder. He and his brother Arun opened their father’s storerooms after his death in 2004, and inaugurated the museum on 28 December 2015.
Arun Dhaddha
Co-founder
“After my father’s demise, my elder brother Suresh Dhaddha and I saw it as our moral responsibility to bring his dream to reality.” He met the designer Paul Mathieu at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2010, and describes the museum’s programme as three-month exhibitions of contemporary work, with workshops and talks.