No evidence that controversial royal jewel
was won by a Persian warlord in a cunning turban swap, say authors
By Michael Safi
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A model holds a replica
of the Koh-i-noor diamond in Calcutta.
Photograph: Deshakalyan
Chowdhury/AFP/Getty Images
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It is the best known and most controversial
jewel in the Tower of London, but virtually everything known about the
Koh-i-noor diamond’s history may be wrong, according to a new book.
Said to be 5,000 years old, and to bear a
curse that afflicts any man – but not woman – who wears it, the jewel was
surrendered to the East India Company by Duleep Singh, a boy maharajah, in
1849.
India has felt the sting of its removal ever
since, with a collection of Bollywood stars and businessmen pressing the UK
government in 2015 to return the “stolen” jewel, on the same legal basis as art
seized by the Nazis during the second world war.
Successive British prime ministers have
stared down India’s 70-year standing request, but a new study by authors
William Dalrymple and Anita Anand finds that even Queen Victoria was “racked
with guilt” about the way the diamond was acquired.
The monarch’s doomed relationship with Singh,
the 10-year-old maharajah whose kingdom the British seized, is one of the more
memorable dramas to be have played out in the glint of the 105-carat diamond,
recounted in the book Koh-i-Noor, released in the UK on Thursday.
The diamond has never been more
controversial. The Indian government is still pressing its request for the
Koh-i-noor’s return. Pakistan has been making its own demands, and in 2000,
even the Taliban wrote to Queen Elizabeth demanding the stone’s return to Afghanistan
“as soon as possible”.
All three base their claims on a traditional
history of the diamond that includes its discovery in Indian antiquity, its
theft by marauding Turks and inheritance by successive lines of kings and
princes, until it was won by a Persian warlord in a cunning turban swap.
Except, none of that may be true. “Every
single item in that potted history has no evidence for it whatsoever,” said
Dalrymple. And yet it has formed the backbone of virtually every account of the
diamond.
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The real diamond is set
in the Queen Mother’s crown.
Photograph: Dan Chung for
the Guardian
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There is no mention of the Koh-i-noor in
recorded history until 1750. Nor was the diamond – contrary to popular belief,
rather flawed and far from the largest ever discovered – particularly revered
by its owners until the 19th century.
It was the British who made the Koh-i-noor an
international brand when they claimed it from Singh and put it on display in
London as a symbol of imperial might.
“It goes to London and bang! Six million
people see it, a third of the British population,” Dalrymple said. “Pencils get
named after it, restaurants get named after it. The Koh-i-noor becomes a
brand.”
But Queen Victoria hesitated to wear the
diamond in public for years after it was triumphantly presented to her in 1850,
apparently stricken by the plight of its previous owner.
Singh, the last maharajah of Punjab, had his
kingdom pried away by the East India Company, the conglomerate that became an
agent of British imperialism in south Asia.
Company agents had arranged for the boy’s
mother to be thrown in prison, to accelerate the surrender process. When Singh
finally signed Punjab over, the Koh-i-noor was an explicit British demand in
the terms of defeat.
The queen eased her conscience at Singh’s
treatment by adopting the boy as her own surrogate son, and then years later,
engineering an extraordinary reunion between boy and jewel.
In a Buckingham Palace drawing room, as
Victoria watched, a then-teenage Singh was handed a newly recut Koh-i-noor. He
observed it with “a passion of repressed emotion on his face”, Dalrymple and
Anand write. Observers feared he might fling the stone out the nearest window.
But Singh knew his part in the royal drama.
He approached Victoria, bowed deeply, and handed her the diamond. “It is to me,
ma’am, the greatest pleasure thus to have the opportunity to, as a loyal
subject, of myself tendering to my sovereign – the Koh-i-noor,” he said.
“Soon after, [Victoria] took to wearing the
Koh-i-noor frequently and conspicuously,” the authors write.
Such episodes make Indian blood boil, but
both Dalrymple and Anand insist their history neither firmly strengthens
India’s claims on the diamond, nor excuses the way it entered British clutches.
“We don’t come to a conclusion,” Dalrymple said. “We lay out the evidence.”
All the world’s diamonds before the 1720s
originated in India – so the Koh-i-noor’s subcontinental origins are not in
dispute. “But, that said, it’s passed between its owners violently at every
stage,” Dalrymple said.
Ultimately he thinks the continuing
controversy over the diamond is a “self-inflicted wound” by the British.
By trumpeting the jewel as emblem of British
conquest of India, at the 1851 Great Exhibition, which was attended by
one-third of the country’s population, “they consciously turned it into a
symbol of imperial loot”, he said.
And so it has remained, while other, arguably
more impressive, Indian gems such as the Great Mughal diamond – now thought by
some to be the Orlov diamond that resides in the Kremlin – have evaded similar
scrutiny. The few minutes Duleep Singh spent holding the Koh-i-noor in the
palace 1854 might be the closest any Indian gets to the jewel ever again.
Some have moved on. Last year the Indian MP
and historian Shashi Tharoor released a book conceding it was likely the
Koh-i-noor would never return. In its place he made another request: for
millions of pounds in colonial reparations.
