Koh-i-Noor

by William Dalrymple

  From these, and from new work by a team of modern gemmologists led by Alan Hart and John Nels Hatleberg, who have recently used laser and X-ray scanning technology to reconstruct the original form of the Koh-i-Noor before it was recut on its arrival in Britain, it has become possible to write an entirely new history of the diamond. What follows is an attempt to free the Koh-i-Noor for the first time from the fog of mythology which has clung to the stone since many of these stories were first propagated by Theo Metcalfe’s report 170 years ago.

  In the first part of this book, ‘The Jewel in the Throne’, William Dalrymple recounts the early history of the Koh-i-Noor. Tracing Indian ideas about diamonds in ancient texts, and through possible medieval and early modern sightings of the gem during Mughal times, to its clear emergence into history following its seizure by Nader Shah, he continues the story via Iran and Afghanistan to Punjab, and the Koh-i-Noor’s temporary disappearance at the death of Ranjit Singh. By this time the diamond was more than an object of desire and had instead become a powerful symbol of sovereignty.

  Anita Anand continues the Koh-i-Noor’s story in the second part of this book, ‘The Jewel in the Crown’, giving the fullest account yet written of the most contested chapter in the diamond’s history: how the Koh-i-Noor was taken from a boy who had lost his kingdom to a colonial power and so reached the British crown and the Tower of London.

  The resulting narrative tells a tale not only of greed, conquest, murder, blindings, torture, seizure, colonialism and appropriation through an impressive slice of South and Central Asian history, but also of changing tastes and fashions in jewellery, ornamentation and personal adornment, and different understandings of the role, alchemy and astrology of precious stones. It reveals some unexpected and previously unknown moments in the diamond’s history, such as the months the diamond spent hidden in a crack in the wall of a prison cell in a remote Afghan fort, and the years during which it languished unrecognised and unvalued on a mullah’s desk, used only as a paperweight for pious sermons.

  PART 1

  THE JEWEL IN THE THRONE

  1

  The Indian Prehistory of the Koh-i-Noor

  Until the discovery of diamond mines in Brazil in 1725, with the sole exception of a seam of black diamond crystals found in the mountains of Borneo, all the world’s diamonds came from India.1

  Ancient Indian diamonds were alluvial: they were not mined so much as sieved and extracted as natural crystals from the soft sands and gravels of ancient riverbeds. Originally ejected from the host rocks – kimberlite and lamproite – by primeval volcanoes, they were swept up by water and transported along rivers, until at last they came to rest when the river died, many millions of years ago. Most such alluvial diamonds are tiny, natural octahedral crystals. Very occasionally, however, a diamond as large as a hen’s egg would be found. One such was the Koh-i-Noor.

  As early as 2000 BCE, tiny Indian diamonds may have been used in polishing tools in ancient Egypt, and they were certainly in common use as abrasives across the Middle East and China by 500 BCE. Soon, diamond crystals were being coveted for their use in rings from the T’ang court through Hellenistic Afghanistan to Augustan Rome.2 But in their Indian homeland, diamonds were not just valued for their usefulness and beauty: they were believed to be supremely auspicious objects, able to channel planetary influences, and so were given an almost semi-divine status. According to the Garuda Purana, a book of Hindu scriptures that reached its final form in the tenth century CE, the demon Bala had agreed to be sacrificed by the gods, and he ‘yielded up his ghost for the good of the universe, and, behold, the severed limbs of his sacrificed body, were converted into the seeds of gems’. Heavenly beings, demons and naga snake deities all rushed to collect these gem seeds, and even the ‘gods came riding in their aerial cars, and carried away the seeds of gems for their own use, some of which dropped down to earth, through the violent concussion of the air. Wherever they dropped, whether in oceans, rivers, mountains or wildernesses, there originated deposits of those gems, through the celestial potency of their seeds.’

  These gems had magical, even divine, qualities: ‘some are endowed with the virtue of expiating all sins, or acting as prophylactics against the effects of poison, snake bites and diseases, while there are others which are possessed of contrary virtues’. But the greatest of all gems were diamonds, ‘the most effulgent of all precious stones … Gods are supposed to dwell in a particle of diamond, wherever found, which is possessed of a clear, light shade, is smooth and divested of all threatening traits such as scratches, marks of crow’s feet, or cloud-like impurities in its interior.’

  The text then goes on to explain the wondrous effects that owning a good diamond can bring to the life of its owner: ‘Prosperity, long life, increase of wives and progeny and domestic animals, and the bringing home of a teeming harvest all attend on the use of a diamond well marked in its points, clear in lustre and divested of baneful traits.’ The Garuda Purana continues:

  Dreadful poisons, secretly administered, prove inoperative in the wearer’s system and all his possessions enjoy a sort of immunity from acts of incendiarism or erosion by water. The complexion of such a person improves in its glow and all his undertakings become prosperous and thriving. Serpents, tigers and thieves fly from the presence of a person wearing such a diamond.3

  The Garuda Purana is possibly the only known text that imagines thieves flying away from diamonds. Certainly by the time of the Bhagavad and Vishnu Puranas, a hundred years later, enormously valuable gems were understood to be potential inducements not just to theft, but even to murder.

  According to these two Puranas, the greatest of all gems was the legendary Syamantaka, ‘the prince of gemstones’, sometimes said to be a huge diamond, at other times a ruby, a gem that provoked envy, greed and violence in those who coveted it, exactly as the Koh-i-Noor would do, not in myth but in reality.

  The Syamantaka was the brilliant jewel of the sun god, Surya, who wore it around his neck, and thereby gained his dazzling appearance. It was an irresistible object of wonder that everyone coveted – but also the first gem in Indian literature to leave a trail of havoc in its wake. For, according to the Bhagavad Purana, ‘when worn by a clean man, it produces gold, but to an unclean person, it indubitably proves fatal’.4 It is therefore the probable origin of a trope which in time would attach itself firmly to the Koh-i-Noor and follow it into English literature: the cursed gem.

  In the Bhagavad Purana, the Syamantaka jewel came down to earth when Satrajit, the Yadava king of Dwarka, and an ardent devotee of Surya, finally encountered his patron deity while walking along the seashore near Dwarka. Unable to look directly at the god because of the brilliant glare of his radiance, King Satrajit asked him to appear in a less blinding form, explaining that he wished to perceive him with greater clarity. Surya then took the Syamantaka off his neck, and Satrajit knelt down and adored his god, whom he now saw was a surprisingly small figure with a body of burnished copper. ‘After Satrajit had duly worshipped him, the divinity said, “Satrajit do you ask for some recompense for your merit?” Satrajit therefore asked for the gem. Surya accordingly gave it to him, as a token of his affection, and went away.’5

  When Satrajit returned to Dwarka wearing the gem, the townsfolk mistook him for the sun god himself; Krishna alone realised that it was the Syamantaka which was responsible for the dazzling glow that now surrounded him. ‘This is not the sun god,’ he said, ‘but rather Satrajit who is glowing because of his jewel.’

  In due course, the jewel passed to Satrajit’s brother. Shortly afterwards, he took it with him when he went out into the forest, where he was brutally mauled and killed by the lion he was hunting. The lion then seized the jewel, ‘and was about to depart holding the gem in his mouth, when Jambavan, the mighty King of the Bears, slew him in turn, and took the spoil home to his cell and gave it to his son as a gewgaw [toy]’.6

  When Satrajit’s brother failed to return from his expedition, the townsfo
lk began to gossip: ‘They concluded that Krishna had murdered him and appropriated the gem, he having been known before to have coveted it.’ Eventually the grieving King Satrajit directly accused Krishna of killing his brother and stealing the Syamantaka. To clear his name, Krishna took a party of townsfolk with him out into the forest, following the trail left by the missing hunter, determined to find out what had happened.

  The tracks led Krishna first to the mutilated corpse of the hunter, then to the great cave of the bear king where Krishna announced: ‘It is for this jewel, O lord of the bears, that we have come to your cave. I intend to use the jewel to disprove false accusations against me.’ But the bear king Jambavan refused to part with the Syamantaka, and a mighty battle took place between the invincible bear king and the beautiful man-god. Only after twenty-eight days of intense combat between the two did Jambavan finally realise that Krishna must be a deity. He bowed down, humbly begged forgiveness and offered Krishna the jewel.

  On Krishna’s triumphant return to Dwarka with the Syamantaka, King Satrajit – ‘hanging his head in great shame’ – was so overcome with remorse at having falsely accused Krishna that in recompense he offered him the hand of his beautiful daughter, Princess Satyabhama. It was a happy marriage but the Syamantaka continued to generate envy and bloodshed all around it.

  Shortly after the wedding ceremony had been celebrated, three evil brothers, led by Prince Satadhanva, took advantage of Krishna’s absence from Dwarka to plan a robbery, intending to seize the irresistibly brilliant gem. One night, they rode to Dwarka, entered the king’s palace and killed him. Then they seized the Syamantaka and escaped from the city. But Princess Satyabhama saw what had happened and fled in tears to her husband, demanding that he avenge his father-in-law and king. This Krishna did, tracking down and eventually killing Prince Satadhava, cutting off his head with his razor-sharp throwing disc, the Sudarshan Chakra.

  This mythological trail of greed, theft and bloodshed so closely mirrored the actual murderous history of the Koh-i-Noor that, by the nineteenth century, many pious Hindus began to equate the diamond with the Syamantaka and the legends of Krishna.

  The world’s oldest treatises on gems and gemmology were written in ancient India, some predating even the Puranas. They often show remarkably detailed ‘knowledge of the colour and hiding place of gems’.7 In many of these early works, the qualities of gems are studied and analysed in great detail, from spinels ‘the colour of pigeons’ blood’, through beryl ‘flashing like parrots’ wings’ to diamonds that ‘can fill the room with the fire of the rainbow’. Some of these texts – known collectively as ratnashastras – display impressive degrees of gemmological connoisseurship: for example, breaking down rubies into four classes, one of which has ten minutely varying shades, ranging from those the lustre of bees and the colour of lotus buds through to those resembling fireflies or the eyes of a cuckoo, to those the colour of pomegranate seeds, collyrium eyeshadow or the juice of the rose-apple fruit. Detailed information is also given to help the reader determine a fake: to test an emerald, for example, one early text advises the reader to take the gem on a Wednesday evening and stand facing the setting sun. A real emerald will emit green rays towards the holder.8

  Gems do not just appear in the mythology and manuals of ancient India, they are also an almost obsessive theme in ancient Indian plays and poetry written in Sanskrit, where the jingle of jewelled ornaments is often used to evoke the favourite setting of the palace pleasure garden. Even Buddhist literature, despite its austere embrace of poverty and asceticism, is pervaded with gemmological imagery: gem doctrines, jewel bodies, diamond sutras and heavenly kingdoms and islands made up of jewels and precious stones.9

  According to an early Tamil text called the Tirukkailaya-nana-ula, a lovely woman at the peak of her youthful beauty should never be entirely naked, even in bed; instead her body’s beauty should be enhanced with gems:

  She adorns her feet with a pair of anklets

  And stacks her wrists with heavy bangles

    Thickly encrusted with gems.

  She decks her hair with an impeccable garland

    Strung with gold thread

  And enlivens her shapely neck with jewels,

  Thus is she a match for Shri herself.10

  This preference for bare, bejewelled bodies was shared throughout India. Many centuries later, the poet Keshavdas (1555–1617), who wrote the deeply sensuous Kavi-priya, or Poet’s Delight, in the court of Orchha, just to the south of Agra, expresses similar ideas and is explicit that a woman’s naked and unornamented body is uninteresting and unerotic compared to one hung with jewels: ‘A woman may be noble, she may have good features. She may have a nice complexion, be filled with love, be shapely. But without ornaments, my friend, she is not beautiful. The same goes for poetry.’11

  Early Indian sculpture shows the centrality of jewellery to Indian courtly life. In many ancient Indian courts, jewellery rather than clothing was the principal form of adornment and a visible sign of court hierarchy, with strict rules being laid down to establish which rank of courtier could wear which gem in which setting. Indeed in the earliest book of Indian statecraft, Kautilya’s Arthasastra, written between the second century BCE and the third century CE, gemmology and the state’s management of its gems are given an entire chapter – ‘On Mines and Precious Stones’ – alongside topics such as diplomacy, ‘Rules for the Envoy’, war, ‘Misappropriation of Revenue by Officers and its Recovery’, spies, intelligence and the use of subtle poisons, as well as the employment of skilled courtesans to administer them.12

  The centrality of gems to ideas of beauty in pre-modern Indian court life is particularly apparent in the art and records of the Cholas of Thanjavur, who dominated the southern peninsula of India from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. Here every queen and goddess sculpted in bronze is shown bare-breasted, but covered in a fabulous profusion of jewelled ornaments. On the walls of the temples are inscribed detailed lists of all the jewellery donated by such queens and their consorts, such as that which still lines the walls of the Great Temple at Thanjavur, recording the donation of Queen Kundavai, the sister of Rajaraja, the greatest of the Chola emperors, around 1010. She gave ‘One sacred girdle adorning the hips, containing gold weighing 521.9 grams. Six hundred and sixty seven large and small diamonds with smooth edges set into it … Eighty three large and small rubies, twenty two halahalam rubies, twenty small rubies, nine bluish rubies, ten unpolished rubies. Two hundred and twelve pearls …’13 The list of donated gems continues for several yards.

  The quality and sheer quantity of jewels worn in pre-modern India is something that all visitors commented on, and all invaders coveted. The greatest poet of the Delhi Sultanate, Amir Khusrau (1253–1325), makes clear the allure held by the rich temples of India in his Khazain al-Futuh, or Treasures of Victory, composed for Sultan Alauddin Khalji (r.1296–1316). In one passage he describes the captured treasury of one temple:

  The diamonds were of such colour that the sun would have to stare hard for ages before the like of them is made in the factory of the rocks. The pearls glistened so brilliantly that the brow of the clouds will have to perspire for years before such pearls again reach the treasury of the sea. For generations the mines will have to drink blood in the stream of the sun before rubies such as these are produced. The emeralds were of water so fine that if the blue sky broke itself into fragments, none of its fragments would equal them. Every diamond sparkled brightly, it seemed as if it was a drop fallen from the sun. As to the other precious stones, their lustre eludes description just as water escapes from a broken pot.14

  In a similar vein, Abdur Razzaq Samarqandi, the fifteenth-century ambassador sent to southern India by the Timurid ruler Shah Rukh of Herat, describes wide-eyed the gems he saw everywhere in the capital of Vijayanagara. This last great southern Indian empire succeeded to much of the territories of the Cholas between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, and did so in some style, accordin
g to Samarqandi. He was astonished by the remarkable profusion of jewellery worn by men and women of every social class and by the sophistication of the jewellers who dealt in such gems: stalls selling pearls, rubies, emeralds and diamonds were, he says, everywhere on view.

  Passing through gardens and orchards bubbling with runnels of clear water and ‘canals formed of chiselled stone, polished and smooth’, Abdur Razzak was taken to an audience with the king, who wore ‘a necklace made of pearls of beautiful water and other splendid gems … on which a jeweller’s intellect would have found it difficult to put a price’. The throne, he writes, ‘was of an extraordinary size, made of gold inlay encrusted with beautiful jewels and ornaments with exceeding delicacy, dexterity and artistic refinement … It is probable that in all the kingdoms of the world, the art in inlaying precious stones is nowhere better understood than in this country.’15

  Vijayanagara was also the supposed location of the largest diamonds in India, according to one of the very first treatises on the subject written by a European – the remarkable Portuguese doctor and natural philosopher Garcia da Orta (1501–68), who was the author of the third book ever printed in India, Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India, published in Goa in 1561.16 Da Orta was a man of wonderfully broad interests, and his subjects range from the Indian names of chessmen and the different varieties of mangoes through the treatment of cholera and curious stories about the proclivities of cobras and mongooses, to the effects of bhang (cannabis).

  Unknown to his rigorously Catholic compatriots, da Orta was in fact a practising Sephardic Jew, whose real Hebrew name was Avraham ben Yitzhak.17 At a time when Jewish converts to Christianity were beginning to face persecution and torture in Portugal and Spain, da Orta took the decision to leave his position as Professor of Medicine at Lisbon University in 1534 and emigrate to the new colony of Goa specifically in order to escape the anti-Semitic attentions of the Inquisition. In the late 1540s when the Inquisition followed him to Goa, he took up a position beyond their reach as personal physician to Sultan Burhan Nizam Shah of Ahmadnagar (1503–53). In the end, his efforts to escape the Inquisitors proved successful, at least during his lifetime: the Inquisition caught up with him only after his death, when in 1580 his remains were posthumously disinterred and incinerated, then thrown into the Mandovi river in Goa.18