Koh-i-Noor

by William Dalrymple

  And so on for several pages.

  A year later, Jahangir records being given one of the largest gems in Mughal history by the governor of Bihar, Ibrahim Fath Jung. The governor sent to court nine uncut and newly discovered diamonds from his province, one of which is recorded as being 348 ratis, so significantly larger even than Babur’s diamond.19

  Jahangir’s passion for gems was one he shared with, and passed on to, his eldest son, Prince Khurram, the future Emperor Shah Jahan (1592–1666). To his father’s delight, Khurram became one of the greatest connoisseurs of precious stones of his time. Over and again, Jahangir comments with pride on his son’s eye for gems, calling him ‘the star in the forehead of accomplished desires, and the brilliancy in the brow of prosperity’. He offers as an example of this an occasion when Jahangir had been given an especially fine pearl and wanted to find a pair for it. Prince Khurram took one look at the pearl and immediately remembered an exact match he had seen several years earlier, which lay ‘in an old turban jewel and was of a weight and shape equal to this pearl. They produced the old sarpech [turban ornament] containing a royal pearl and indeed it was of exactly the same quality, weight and shape, lustre and brilliance; one might say they had been shed from the same mould. Placing the two pearls alongside the ruby, I bound them on my arm.’20

  In due course Shah Jahan’s love of beautiful and precious objects outshone even that of his father, as visitors noted. According to Edward Terry, Sir Thomas Roe’s chaplain, Shah Jahan was ‘the greatest and the richest master of precious stones that inhabits the whole earth’. The Portuguese Friar Manrique reported that he was so fascinated by gems that even when there appeared before him after a banquet twelve dancing girls decked out in ‘lascivious and suggestive dress, immodest behaviour and posturing’, the emperor hardly raised his eyes, but instead continued inspecting some fine jewels that had been brought to him by his brother-in-law, Asaf Khan. It has recently emerged that after apparently damaging his eyes through excessive weeping over the death of Mumtaz Mahal, Shah Jahan even commissioned two pairs of bejewelled spectacles, one with lenses of diamonds, the other with lenses of emeralds.21

  It was not, however, just about beauty and luxury. Like the Mughals’ miniature-painting ateliers, under Shah Jahan the imperial jewellery workshops were expected to put their work to the service of imperial and dynastic propaganda. A newly discovered sardonyx-hilted dagger that appeared recently on the London art market makes this particularly clear, giving a striking reflection of the imperial aspirations of Shah Jahan and his court: the cartouche reads unequivocally, ‘The dagger of the king of kings, the defender of religion and conqueror of the world. The Second Lord of Happy Conjunction, Shah Jahan, is like the new moon, but out of its shining triumphs, it makes the world shine eternally like the rays of the Sun.’ To his subjects Shah Jahan presented himself not just as the ruler; he wanted to be thought of as a centre of Divine Light, a sun king, in fact almost a sun god.

  The largest diamond recorded as entering the Mughal treasury during the reign of Shah Jahan came as a gift from another of the great gem connoisseurs of the period. Mir Jumla was a Persian immigrant to the Deccan, who set himself up as a merchant and gem dealer. According to the Venetian traveller Niccolao Manucci, ‘Mir Jumla initially went through the streets from door to door selling shoes; but fortune resolved to favour him, and little by little he rose to be a great merchant of much fame in the kingdom. Owing to his being very rich, with ships at sea, and also a man of much wisdom and very generous, he gained for himself many friends at court … [and soon] filled various honourable offices.’

  He continued to rise – ultimately to the rank of prime minister of Golconda – by presenting to the king and other key nobles valuable gifts of gems, ‘jewels and diamonds which he extracted from the mines … During his government in the Karnatik, Mir Jumla gathered together the great treasures which then existed in that province, in the ancient temples of the Hindu idols. Besides these, others were discovered by his exertions in the said province, which for precious stones is very famous.’22

  The French diamond merchant Jean Baptiste Tavernier (1605–89) gives a wonderfully revealing – if chilling – portrait of Mir Jumla at the peak of his power. Tavernier went to present his salaams one evening, and found Mir Jumla sitting in his tent at the centre of the camp in the Deccan countryside.

  According to the custom of the country, the Nawab [governor] had the intervals between his toes full of letters, and he also held many between the fingers of his left hand. He drew them sometimes from his feet, and sometimes from his hand, and he sent replies through his two secretaries, writing some also himself. After the secretaries had finished the letters, he made them read them; and he then affixed his seal himself, giving some to foot messengers, some to horsemen.23

  While all this was going on, four criminals were brought to the door of his tent. Mir Jumla paid no attention to them for half an hour, but then had them marched in, ‘and after having questioned them, and made them confess with their own mouths, he remained nearly an hour without saying anything, continuing to write and make his secretaries write’, as a succession of officers from the army came to pay their respects. At this point, a meal was brought in, so he turned his attention to the four prisoners, calmly ordering one to have his hands and feet cut off and to be left in a field to bleed to death, another to have ‘his stomach slit open and thrown in a drain’ and the remaining two to be beheaded. ‘While all this passed, dinner was served.’24

  Throughout the 1650s, the Mughals increasingly focused on seizing the different kingdoms of the Deccan, at least in part so that they could possess the territory which produced the gems they were so obsessed with. In the words of the Shah Jahan Nama, the official history of the reign, ‘This territory contained mines teeming with diamonds.’25 At the same time, Mir Jumla fell out of favour with the sultan of Golconda, as rumours spread of his having had an affair with the queen mother. He therefore took the opportunity presented by a Mughal attack to defect to the service of Shah Jahan.

  He sealed the pact, on 7 July 1656, by presenting Shah Jahan, within the newly inaugurated Red Fort of Shahjahanabad, with what Manucci describes as ‘a large uncut diamond which weighed 360 carats’, and what the Shah Jahan Nama calls ‘an offering of exquisite gems, amongst which was a huge diamond weighing 216 ratis’.26 Tavernier later called this stone ‘that celebrated diamond which generally has been deemed unparalleled in size and beauty’. He said it was presented uncut at 900 ratis, or 787 metric carats, and added that it had come from the mines of Kollur (today in Karnataka).

  Centuries later, many Victorian commentators identified this diamond both with Babur’s diamond, which had disappeared into the Deccan a hundred years earlier, and with the Koh-i-Noor, which had by then come to be seen as the greatest of all Indian diamonds. Yet there is no suggestion in any of these texts that Mir Jumla was claiming to return to the Mughals their greatest family diamond, which had been lost to them since the time of Humayun – a claim he certainly would have made if this were true, given how much he wished to ingratiate himself with his new patrons.

  Instead, it sounds as if this huge diamond – which Tavernier explicitly says was presented uncut, and for which our three different sources give widely different but very high weights – was a new discovery, and an unprecedented addition to the Mughal treasury.27

  In 1628, at the height of his power, Shah Jahan brought the Mughal love affair with precious stones to its climax when he commissioned the most spectacular jewelled object ever made: the Peacock Throne.

  Initially, it seems that the commission for a massive solid gold throne ‘covered with diamonds, rubies, pearls and emeralds’ was given to a French jeweller at the Mughal court named Augustin Hiriart.28 Although the Mughals liked their diamonds cut differently from their contemporaries in the West – preferring to keep and celebrate the natural weight and shape of a stone rather than cutting to produce the smaller but more symmetrically cut gem
s favoured in Europe – at this stage in the seventeenth century European jewellers had established a slight technological edge on their Mughal rivals. There are references to emperors and other Indian rulers sending gems via the Jesuits to be cut in Goa, or even in the European merchant colony at Aleppo.29 Hiriart was by no means the only Western jeweller to have found work at the Mughal court: an Englishman named Peter Mutton was also taken into the imperial karkhana (atelier).

  Shortly afterwards, however, Hiriart left Mughal service and headed off to Goa, so it was Sa’ida-yi Gilani, an Iranian poet and calligrapher-turned-goldsmith and jewel-master, who started work on the commission afresh. The finished Peacock Throne was finally inaugurated at New Year 1635, on the emperor’s return from his holidays in Kashmir.30

  The Jewelled Throne – as it was initially known – was an object of the greatest magnificence, designed to resemble and evoke the fabled throne of Solomon. The Mughals had long surrounded themselves with the aura of the ancient kings – both historical and mythical – of the Middle East and Iran whom they had read about in the Quran and in epic poems like the Shahnama. Drawing on these exemplars, the Mughals claimed that their divinely illuminated kingship and their just rule would bring to the world a golden age of prosperity and peace. For Shah Jahan in particular, Solomon, the exemplary Quranic ruler and prophet king, was both a role model and a figure of identification, and he had himself celebrated by his poets as a second Solomon; Mumtaz Mahal, meanwhile, was praised as the new queen of Sheba.

  Accordingly, the Jewelled Throne was made so that anyone who knew their Quran would immediately see it as an echo of Solomon’s throne. It had four columns which carried a baldachin (ceremonial canopy), on which were depicted flowering trees and peacocks in gemstones. The columns had the form of tapering balusters, which the Mughals called cypress shaped, and were covered with green enamel or emeralds, to augment their treelike character. Above this were perched either one or, in most accounts, two freestanding figures of peacocks, a reference to the seat of Solomon which according to both Jewish and Islamic texts was decorated with jewelled trees and birds.

  The best contemporary account we have of the throne is by the official court chronicler, Ahmad Shah Lahori, in the Padshahnama:

  In the course of years many valuable gems had come into the Imperial jewel-house, each one of which might serve as an ear-drop for Venus, or would adorn the girdle of the Sun. Upon the accession of the Emperor, it occurred to his mind that, in the opinion of far-seeing men, the acquisition of such rare jewels and the keeping of such wonderful brilliants can only render one service, that of adorning the throne of empire. They ought therefore to be put to such a use that beholders might share in and benefit by their splendour, and that Majesty might shine with increased brilliancy.31

  Lahori recounts how in addition to the jewels already stored in the imperial jewel-house, ‘rubies, garnets, diamonds, rich pearls and emeralds, to the value of 200 lakhs of rupees, should be brought for the inspection of the Emperor, and that they, with some exquisite jewels of great weight, exceeding 50,000 miskals, having been carefully selected, should be handed over to Bebadal Khan [Sa’ida-yi Gilani’s later title], the superintendent of the goldsmith’s department’.

  The outside of the canopy was to be of enamel work studded with gems, the inside was to be thickly set with rubies, garnets, and other jewels, and it was to be supported by emerald columns. On the top of each pillar there were to be two peacocks thick set with gems, and between each of the two peacocks a tree set with rubies and diamonds, emeralds and pearls. The ascent was to consist of three steps, set with jewels of fine water. This throne was completed in the course of seven years at a cost of 100 lakhs of rupees.

  Given Mughal tastes, it is not surprising that the one stone that Lahori singled out for mention was not a diamond but a ruby:

  Among the jewels set in this recess was a ruby worth a lakh of rupees, which Shah ‘Abbas, the king of Iran, had presented to the late Emperor Jahangir, who sent it to his present Majesty, the Sahib Kiran-i sani, when he accomplished the conquest of the Dakhin. On it were engraved the names of Sahib-kiran (Timur), Mir Shah Rukh, and Mirza Ulugh Beg. When in course of time it came into the possession of Shah ‘Abbas, his name was added; and when Jahangir obtained it, he added the name of himself and of his father. Now it received the addition of the name of his most gracious Majesty Shah Jahan.

  The ruby would, under various names – the Timur Ruby, the Ayn al-Hur, Eye of the Houri, and the Fakhraj – shadow the Koh-i-Noor and share its fate for the next two centuries. Only very much later, with changing tastes in the early nineteenth century, did the diamond come to be seen as more beautiful and significant than the ruby.

  Shah Jahan’s reign came to a dramatically premature end in 1658. Late in 1657 the Emperor suffered a stroke, and his son Dara Shukoh took over effective governance. Initially believing their father to be dead, the four royal princes began military manoeuvres that led Aurangzeb, eventually, to stage a skilful coup d’état, deposing his father and imprisoning him in the Red Fort of Agra, in a set of apartments looking out over the Taj.

  Aurangzeb had headed north from the Deccan with a battle-hardened army, and defeated his rival brother Dara Shukoh at Samugarh, a few miles from Agra. In 1659, he had had his brother murdered a few days after capturing him. According to Manucci, he then sent his father a reconciliation present. When the old man opened it, it was found to contain the head of Dara.

  It was shortly after this that we get one last glimpse of the Mughal treasury in all its glory before the empire collapsed and the Koh-i-Noor left India. In 1665 Jean Baptiste Tavernier was given by Aurangzeb (1618–1707) the unprecedented honour of being shown the highlights of the Mughal treasury. Encouraged by Louis XIV, Tavernier had made five previous journeys to India between 1630 and 1668, with a view to understanding more about diamonds, which he calls ‘the most precious of all stones, and the article of trade to which I am most devoted. In order to acquire a thorough knowledge of it, I resolved to visit all the mines and one of the two rivers where diamonds are found.’

  In his earlier journeys, Tavernier had brought back enough diamonds to win a baronetcy from Louis but it was only on his final trip that Aurangzeb finally gave his permission for Tavernier to see his private collection. ‘On the first day of November 1665,’ he wrote, ‘I went to the palace to take leave of the Emperor, but he said that he did not wish me to depart without having seen his jewels and witnessing the splendour of his fete.’32

  Shortly afterwards, Tavernier was summoned to the palace, where he did obeisance to the emperor, and was then ushered into a small apartment within sight of the Diwan-i-Khas.

  I found in this apartment Akil Khan, chief of the jewel treasury, who, when he saw us, commanded four of the imperial eunuchs to bring jewels, which were carried in two large wooden trays lacquered with gold leaf, and covered with small cloths made expressly for the purpose – one of red and the other of green brocaded velvet. After these trays were uncovered, and all the pieces had been counted three times over, a list was prepared by the three scribes who were present. For the Indians do everything with great care and composure, and when they see anyone acting in a hurry or irritated they stare at him in silence and laugh at him for being a fool.33

  Among the stones Tavernier was shown that day was the enormous gem he calls the Great Mughal Diamond and which he says was the gem given to Shah Jahan by Mir Jumla: ‘The first piece that Akil Khan (Chief Keeper of the King’s jewels) placed in my hands was the great diamond, which is rose cut, round and very high on one side. On the lower edge there is a slight crack, and a little flaw in it. Its water is fine, and weighs 286 [metric] carats.’ He also mentions that the stone had been badly cut since Mir Jumla gifted it, and that thanks to the incompetence of the man responsible, Hortensio Borgio, the stone had lost much of its original astonishing size. Tavernier also saw two other great diamonds, one of which was a flat, pink stone in a table cut, which he calls the
Great Table Diamond, and which from his drawing is clearly the major portion of the Darya-i-Noor, now in Tehran.34

  Was the Great Mughal diamond the Koh-i-Noor? In the nineteenth century it was assumed that it must be, but most modern scholars are now convinced that the Great Mughal is actually the Orlov, which with its higher, more rounded dome looks much more like Tavernier’s sketch of the Great Mughal. Moreover, the Orlov and the Great Mughal have the same type of cut, and the same pattern of facets.35 None of the other stones seen by Tavernier looks at all like the Koh-i-Noor either.

  How is it possible that Tavernier failed to see the Koh-i-Noor when the emperor explicitly gave permission for him to see his greatest gems? There are two possibilities. One is that the Koh-i-Noor was at this stage still in the collection of Shah Jahan, who in 1665 remained under house arrest in his apartments in the Red Fort of Agra. It is known from several sources, including Manucci and the Shah Jahan Nama, that the deposed emperor had not handed over all his personal diamond collection to his usurping son; indeed Aurangzeb got his hands on Shah Jahan’s favourite gems only after his death.

  But more probably, if Marvi’s eyewitness account of Nader Shah’s seizure of the Peacock Throne in 1750 is to be believed, the Koh-i-Noor was not in the imperial treasury because it was already lodged beyond Tavernier’s close inspection, glittering on the top of the Peacock Throne, attached to the head of one of the peacocks which surmounted it. Tavernier certainly saw the Peacock Throne from a distance, and he describes the diamonds which covered it, but it seems he did not get close enough to see the stupendous size of the gems on its roof.