Koh-i-Noor

by William Dalrymple

  Agha Muhammad was eventually assassinated by two of his personal servants, but not before he had performed an atrocity even more horrific than any carried out by Nader Shah. When he captured the southern Persian capital of Kerman which had revolted against him, he ordered that the women and children should be given over to his soldiers as slaves, and that any surviving men be killed. To make sure no one skimped on his orders, he commanded that the men’s eyeballs be brought to him in baskets, and poured on the floor. He stopped counting only at 20,000.33 Thirty years later, travellers still found hundreds of blind beggars stumbling around the region as living evidence of this atrocity. The Darya-i-Noor eventually found its way into the Qajar and Pahlavi crown jewels, where it remains, in the national bank in Tehran.

  Meanwhile, the Great Mughal diamond found its way into the open market in Turkestan, where it was eventually purchased by an Armenian trader who shipped it to the emerging world centre of the diamond market in Amsterdam. Here it was purchased by Count Orlov, a dashing Russian aristocrat and lover of Catherine the Great. On his return to St Petersburg, however, he discovered that he had been supplanted in Catherine’s bed by his rival Potemkin, and that in his absence his family had lost their position at court. He presented the gem to Catherine on her name day, full of hope – but while the diamond ended up in Catherine’s sceptre, he remained as far from her bedchamber as he had been since his return from his travels. Having gone massively into debt to buy the stone, he soon realised he had ruined himself, and the count ended his days raving in a Russian lunatic asylum. The gem is now on show, amid the other Russian crown jewels, in the Kremlin.34

  The Koh-i-Noor and its sister, the Timur Ruby, were both kept by Ahmad Khan Abdali on his person. He wore them both in an armlet in Kandahar when he took the throne to create what became in time a new country, and the home of the Koh-i-Noor for the next seventy years – Afghanistan.

  4

  The Durranis: The Koh-i-Noor in Afghanistan

  Ahmad Khan knew he would be followed by his Persian enemies when he fled the violence and chaos of Nader Shah’s camp with the Koh-i-Noor. He therefore took precautions, throwing off his 10,000 pursuers by sending a small diversionary force towards Herat, while he headed on to Kandahar, along with the bulk of his troops. The Persians fell for the ruse, and Ahmad Khan reached the safety of his tribal heartlands without having to fight, and with the Koh-i-Noor strapped safely on his arm.

  Further good fortune followed. A caravan carrying huge amounts of gold, jewels and treasure intended for the salaries of Nader Shah’s troops had just arrived at Kandahar, probably under the guard of Ahmad Khan’s Abdali relatives. Ahmad Khan seized the bullion, and immediately put it to use to buy allies and influence. Within a few months, at a grand jirga, or gathering of the clans, held at the shrine of Sher Surkh near Kandahar in July 1747, the twenty-four-year-old Ahmad Khan was elected paramount chief, not just of his own Abdali clan, but of all the Afghan tribes. A celebrated Sufi holy man then placed some barley sheaves in Ahmad Khan’s turban, crowning him Padshah, Durr-i-Durran – Emperor, and Pearl of Pearls.1 From this point on, Ahmad Khan Abdali became known as Ahmad Shah Durrani.

  Ahmad Shah’s first conquests were Kabul and Herat. He then turned southwards, determined, like his hero Nader Shah, to fill his treasury with the plundered wealth of Hindustan. He seized Lahore, Multan and western Punjab, destroying the most sacred temples of the Sikhs at Amritsar and fixing the southern boundary of his empire at Sindh and at the great shrine of Sirhind in Punjab. He also invaded and took Kashmir.

  According to the Orientalist and East India Company diplomat Mountstuart Elphinstone:

  For the consolidation of his power at home, he relied, in great measure, on the effects of foreign wars. If these were successful, his victories would raise his reputation, and his conquests would supply him with the means of maintaining an army, and of attaching Afghan chiefs by favours and rewards: the hope of plunder would induce many tribes to join him, whom he could not easily have compelled to submit … In framing his government he appears to have had the model of Persia before his eyes. The forms of his court, the great officers of state, the arrangements of the army, and the pretensions of the crown, were exactly the same as those of Nader Shah.2

  Like Nader Shah, he also looted Delhi and massacred its citizens, leaving it in an even worse state than the Persians had done. Delhi – still much the richest city in Asia – recovered from Nader’s visit in a few years. It took half a century for it to recover from Ahmad Shah’s successive sackings. The poet Mir had fled from Delhi as Abdali’s forces first closed in. When he returned several months later, he found the great capital despoiled and depopulated. He wrote:

  What can I say about the rascally boys of the bazaar when there was no bazaar itself? The handsome young men had passed away, the pious old men had passed away. The palaces were in ruin, the streets were lost in rubble …

  Suddenly I found myself in the neighbourhood where I had lived – where I gathered friends and recited my verses; where I lived the life of love and cried many a night. But now no familiar face came to sight so that I could spend some happy moments with them. The bazaar was a place of desolation; the lane was a track of wilderness. At every step I shed tears and learned the lesson of mortality. And the further I went, the more bewildered I became. I could not recognize my neighbourhood or house … Houses had collapsed. Walls had fallen down. The hospices were bereft of Sufis. The taverns were empty of revellers. It was a wasteland from one end to the other … I stood there and looked at it in amazement, and was horrified. I swore I would never return to the city.3

  After eight successive raids deeper and deeper into the plains of north India, Ahmad Shah finally crushed the massed cavalry of the Maratha Confederacy at the battle of Panipat on 14 January 1761, leaving tens of thousands dead on the field of battle. It was his greatest victory: Ahmad Shah along with his Mughal allies, in all an army 60,000 strong, had defeated 45,000 Marathas along a front seven miles long. The battle began with a cannonade that lasted until noon. Around 1.30 p.m., many of the Marathas, who had not eaten for a day, began wandering off in search of food and their line showed signs of cracking. All afternoon, massed Afghan swivel guns and a succession of brilliant cavalry charges cut down the Maratha horse. By evening around 28,000 Marathas lay dead, among them their general Sadashiva Rao, and the son of the head of the Maratha confederacy, the Peshwa.

  The next day Ahmad Shah made a triumphant visit to the Sufi shrine of Sirhind with the Koh-i-Noor flashing on his arm.4 He had won a crushing victory that definitively ended the dream of the emergence of an independent Maratha empire to replace that of the Mughals, and in the long term created a power vacuum that would leave India at the mercy of the armies of the East India Company. In the short term, however, it made Ahmad Shah the unrivalled warlord of his day. At its peak his Durrani Empire extended far beyond the boundaries of the modern Afghan state, stretching from Nishapur in Iran to Sirhind, and encompassing Afghanistan, Kashmir, Punjab and Sindh. After the Ottomans, it was the greatest Muslim empire of the second half of the eighteenth century. Yet though India was at his mercy, he never tried to rule in the place of the Mughals, and his gaze remained fixed on the mountains of the Hindu Kush. A poet as much as a warrior, he was clear where his heart belonged:

  Whatever countries I conquer in the world,

  I will never forget your beautiful gardens.

  When I remember the summits of your beautiful

  mountains

  I forget the greatness of the throne of Delhi.5

  Few possessors of the Koh-i-Noor have led happy lives, and while Ahmad Shah rarely lost a battle, he was eventually defeated by a foe more intractable than any army. From early on in his reign, his face began to be eaten away by what the Afghan sources call a ‘gangrenous ulcer’, possibly leprosy, syphilis or some form of tumour. Even as he was winning his greatest victory at Panipat, Ahmad Shah’s disease had already consumed his nose, and a diamond-studd
ed substitute was attached in its place. As his army grew to a horde of 120,000, and as his empire expanded ever wider, so did the tumour, ravaging his brain, spreading to his chest and throat and incapacitating his limbs. He sought healing in Sufi shrines, and consulted both Muslim Yunani hakims and Hindu holy men, but none of this brought him the healing he craved.

  We catch a small glimpse of the increasing desperation of Ahmad Shah in the mid-1760s, in the travel account of a peripatetic Indian holy man called Purn Puri. Puri, who had taken a vow to keep one hand in the air for the rest of his life, was on a pilgrimage in Afghanistan when he and his party encountered the army of Ahmad Shah, accompanied by 30,000 of his horsemen near Ghazni. The sadhus had reason to be apprehensive, since Ahmad Shah had destroyed both Hindu temples in Mathura and Sikh holy places in Amritsar, so they sat down to watch the army pass, keeping as inconspicuous as possible. Ahmad Shah, however, spotted them and that evening he sent for the party of pilgrims to join him.

  In Purn Puri’s words:

  [The shah] had for some time been troubled with an ulcer in his nose: he therefore said to me, ‘Fakeer! You are a native of India. Do you know of any remedy for this disease?’ I told him, I was not acquainted with any remedy to remove that which had been inflicted by God. I also said, ‘Recollect, O king! That ever since thou hadst this ulcer, thou hast been seated on the throne.’ This assertion met with the king’s approbation, as he knew it to be true: he consequently turned to his minister, Shah Wully Khan, and said, ‘Let these fakeers be conveyed on the elephants which are going to Herat, and let written orders be granted to them, that they may be supplied with provisions at every village where they may halt, until they reach Herat.’6

  As Ahmad Shah’s health deteriorated, his Durrani Empire began to show the first signs of disintegration. The Sikhs whom he had repeatedly chastised, but always failed to cow, followed Ahmad Shah’s armies closely on his last retreat from India in 1767 and, as he headed up the switchbacks of the Khyber, captured the greatest fortress in Punjab, Rohtas, and seized control of the land as far north as Rawalpindi.

  By 1772, maggots were dropping from the upper part of Ahmad Shah’s rotten nose into his mouth and his food as he ate. Having despaired of finding a cure, he took to his bed at Murgha in the Achakzai Toba hills, where he had gone to escape the summer heat of Kandahar.7 As one observer put it, ‘The leaves and fruit of his date palm then fell to the ground, and he returned whence he had come.’8

  Ahmad Shah’s diminutive son, Timur Shah, successfully maintained the heartlands of the empire his father had bequeathed to him. Born in Persia, in Mashhad, he never learned the Pashtun language, preferring Persian, and he disliked the rough manners of many of the Durrani nobles, surrounding himself instead with Persian Sufis, scholars and poets.

  He moved the capital from Kandahar to Kabul, keeping out of the turbulent Pashtun heartlands, and looked to the Qizilbash – Shia colonists who had first come to Afghanistan from Persia with the armies of Nader Shah – for his royal guard. Like the Qizilbash, his court was Persian-speaking and culturally Persianised: in many ways Timur Shah looked to his Timurid predecessors – ‘the Oriental Medici’ as Robert Byron dubbed them9 – for his cultural models.

  A man of great taste and culture, Timur Shah designed the gorgeous pavilions and formal gardens of both the Bala Hissar forts – in Kabul, his summer residence, and Peshawar, where he preferred to spend the winter. He was inspired by the stories of his senior wife, a Mughal princess who had grown up in the Delhi Red Fort with its courtyards of fountains and shade-giving fruit trees. Like his Mughal in-laws, he had a talent for dazzling display. ‘He modelled his government on that of the great rulers,’ records the Siraj ul-Tawarikh. ‘He wore a diamond-studded brooch on his turban and a bejewelled sash over his shoulder. His overcoat was ornamented with precious stones, and he wore the Koh-i-Noor on his right forearm, and the Fakhraj ruby on his left. His Highness Timur Shah also mounted another encrusted brooch on his horse’s forehead. Because he was a man of short stature, a bejewelled stepstool was also made for him. Wherever he rode, he would use it to mount his horse.’10

  Like his contemporary Napoleon, similarly small-sized, Timur Shah was a remarkable general. Though he lost the Persian and Sindhi territories of his father’s empire, he fought hard to preserve the Afghan core: in 1778–9, he recovered the rebellious city of Multan, returning with the heads of several thousand Sikh rebels laden on camels. The heads were then put on display as trophies.11

  In 1791, a conspiracy against Timur’s life was hatched in Peshawar and nearly succeeded. The welter of killings which Timur embarked on to destroy the conspirators, and the cold-blooded way he violated an oath to capture one of the ringleaders, cast a cloud over his final years. He died two years later in the spring of 1793, on his way from Peshawar to Kabul, probably from poison: as the historian Mirza ‘Ata Mohammad put it, ‘The wine server of fate served him the fatal cup.’12

  Timur left thirty-six children, twenty-four of whom were sons, but he failed to nominate an heir. The prolonged succession struggle that followed his death – with all the competing claimants, many of them provincial governors, energetically capturing, murdering and maiming each other – undermined the last fragments of authority of the Durrani state Ahmad Shah had founded. Under Timur Shah’s eventual successor, Shah Zaman, the empire finally disintegrated.

  In 1795, Shah Zaman, like his father and grandfather, decided to revive his fortunes and fill his treasuries by ordering a full-scale invasion of Hindustan – the time-honoured Afghan solution to cash crises. He descended the Khyber Pass and moved within the walls of the Mughal fort of Lahore to plan his raid on the rich plains of north India, ‘spreading his owl-like shadow over the Punjab’.13

  By this time, however, India was increasingly coming under the sway of the East India Company. Under its most ambitious governor general, Lord Wellesley, the elder brother of the Duke of Wellington, the Company was expanding aggressively out from its coastal factories to conquer much of the interior; Wellesley’s Indian campaigns would ultimately annex more territory than all of Napoleon’s conquests in Europe. India was no longer the source of easy plunder it had once been, and Wellesley was an especially cunning adversary.

  Wellesley encouraged the Qajar Persian shah to attack Shah Zaman’s undefended rear. In 1799, as the news of the Persian siege of Herat reached him, Shah Zaman was forced to retreat. In the process he left Lahore under the governorship of a capable and ambitious young Sikh, Raja Ranjit Singh. Ranjit’s grandfather, Charat Singh, had been among the first Sikhs to build strong forts and defy the authority of the Durranis’ lieutenants thirty years earlier. Ranjit Singh had also initially harried Shah Zaman’s troops, but as the Afghan prepared to retreat he changed tack. Reaching out to make peace, he helped Shah Zaman save some cannon lost in the mud of the River Jhelum. By charming the shah, and impressing him with his efficiency, Ranjit Singh was given charge of much of Punjab, although he was only nineteen years old, blind in one eye from a childhood bout of smallpox, and commanded barely 5,000 horse.14 He took charge of the citadel of Lahore on 7 July 1799, and held it for the rest of his life.

  In the years that followed, as Shah Zaman tried to maintain his fracturing empire, it was Ranjit Singh who would slowly prise the lucrative eastern provinces of the Durrani Empire from his former overlord and take his place as the dominant power, eventually ruling not just Punjab, but all the lands from Peshawar to the borders of Sindh.

  As the Sikhs consolidated their power, and as Durrani Afghanistan retreated into tribal civil war, 800 years of history – beginning with the invasions of Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) – drew to a close: since 1799 no Afghan has succeeded in invading the Punjab plains or raiding the rich plains of Hindustan beyond. It was during this period too that Afghanistan accelerated its transformation from the sophisticated centre of learning and the arts, which led some of the Great Mughals to regard it as a far more cultured place than India, to the fractured war-to
rn backwater it was to become for so much of its modern history. Already Shah Zaman’s kingdom was only a shadow of that once ruled by his father. The great colleges, such as that of Gauhar Shad in Herat, had long shrunk in size and reputation; the poets and artists, the calligraphers and miniaturists, the architects and tile-makers for which Khurasan was famous under the Timurids, continued their migration south-eastwards to Lahore, Multan and the cities of Hindustan, and westwards to Persia.

  ‘The Afghans of Khurasan have an age-old reputation’, wrote Mirza ‘Ata Mohammad, one of the most perceptive writers of the age, ‘that wherever the lamp of power burns brightly, there like moths they swarm; and wherever the tablecloth of plenty is spread, there like flies they gather.’ The reverse was also true. As Shah Zaman retreated, thwarted from plundering India, and hemmed in by the Sikhs, British and Persians, his authority waned as, one by one, his nobles, his extended family and even his half-brothers rebelled against him. The Durrani state was on the verge of collapse and Shah Zaman’s authority rarely extended further than a day’s march beyond wherever his small army of supporters happened to be camped.

  The end of Shah Zaman’s rule came during the icy winter of 1800, when the Kabulis finally refused to open the city gates to their feckless king. Instead, one cold winter’s night, he took shelter from the gathering blizzard in a fortress between Jalalabad and the Khyber. According to the Siraj ul-Tawarikh:

  Exhausted by the trip, the Shah stopped over at the fortress of a certain Shinwari named ‘Ashiq, to get some much needed rest.

  At first, ‘Ashiq showed every sign of respect and fulfilled all the obligations of host. But just as the Shah was feeling comfortable, ‘Ashiq summoned two hundred Shinwaris in the middle of the night and locked the gates of the fortress so that no one could get out. After manning the towers and ramparts with Shinwari musketeers, ‘Ashiq sent his son as fast as he could ride to [Shah Zaman’s rival] Prince Mahmud, who had just seized Kabul. He brought the welcome news that Shah Zaman had been captured and obtained a reward from the prince for this service. Shah Zaman, meantime, now aware of his host’s perfidy, tried every way possible to find the key to escape but was unable to unlock the door of ‘Ashiq’s hardheartedness and deception.15