Koh-i-Noor

by William Dalrymple

  The great maharaja was dead. Yet even as Ranjit Singh’s cremation pyre was being kindled with sandalwood, the Koh-i-Noor – so visible throughout the latter part of Ranjit Singh’s reign – was nowhere to be seen. Moreover, the issue of what to do with the great diamond remained wholly unresolved. Ranjit’s successors were left with only a series of questions. Where exactly was the diamond? Had Misr Beli Ram hidden it? Had it already been sent off to the Jagannath temple in Orissa, as Ranjit Singh had apparently indicated? Was that really his wish? Had he been bullied into this last action by the manipulative Bhai Gobind Ram and the other Brahmins who surrounded him? Was the Koh-i-Noor Ranjit’s personal property to give away as he pleased? Or did the stone actually belong to the state, and his successors, and in some way represent the independence of the Sikh kingdom?

  These unanswered questions helped sow the seeds of dissension that would soon rend the entire Sikh empire and propel it into full-scale civil war. The diamond was nowhere to be seen, and yet – like the legendary Syamantaka, with which some identified it – it had lost none of its extraordinary ability to create discord all around it.

  PART 2

  THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN

  6

  City of Ash

  For three days and nights, the scent of burning flesh and sandalwood filled the palace grounds. The cremation of Ranjit Singh at the end of June 1839 attracted thousands from across Punjab. Death rites for maharajas have never been subtle, yet even by Indian standards the Lion of Punjab was sent off in spectacular fashion.

  One of the most comprehensive accounts of the numerous ceremonies performed for the dead king comes from a European serving in the Lahore durbar. John Martin Honigberger, a doctor and adventurer from Austro-Hungary, had come to Punjab ten years earlier and had served at the pleasure of Ranjit Singh ever since. As a high-ranking official in the court, he had been required to keep his vigil while the cremation fire burned and the ashes cooled. Exhausted by the effort, he looked on as small sunburned men raked up ash and charred lumps of bone. This was all that remained of his once formidable patient. He felt nothing but disgust for his old patron now: Ranjit Singh’s last rites filled Honigberger’s mind with images he would rather forget.

  Three days earlier, in the space between the palace and the outer walls of the Lahore Fort had stood a colossal pyre of wood. All Punjab seemed to have been drawn to the capital that day, a pulsing sea of grieving humanity, and Honigberger’s ears had thrummed with the volume of noise which surrounded him.

  Honigberger was shown to his place, in front of the neck-craning masses. Around him the nobles of the Sikh Sirdara stood barefoot and dressed in white. Everyone who mattered seemed to be there, except for the very highest-ranking Sikh nobles, who had the singular honour of accompanying their sovereign on the last journey he would ever make. Honigberger watched and waited for the funeral procession to come into view.

  A double line of infantry, a quarter of a mile long, drove a wide furrow through the mourners. Through it, Honigberger saw Ranjit Singh’s body, laid out on a golden platform made to look like a ship with spun-gold sails.1 It was a fitting bier, for the maharaja’s body seemed to be carried on waves of wailing. Musicians added to the cacophony with their drums and horns.

  His senses battered, Honigberger then caught sight of the women in the maharaja’s slipstream. Rani Mahtab Devi, known lovingly as ‘Guddan’, was held aloft on a golden chair, carried by sweating bearers. Behind her followed three similar chairs, each filled by a queen.2 Though he saw them all, he noticed only Rani Guddan. She and Honigberger had come to Lahore for the first time in the same year. Back then, he had been a young doctor, an adventurer determined to make his name and fortune. Guddan was a Rajput princess. Both she and her sister, Rani Raj Banso, had been betrothed to the maharaja.

  Somehow Honigberger, who had always managed to charm his way in society, had inveigled his way into the royal wedding, one pale face lost among thousands. He remembered that Guddan had a reputation for great beauty then, a rumour he was unable to verify. Guddan had been veiled for her marriage and every day since. Only now, ten years later, on the day of her death, could she show her face in public. Honigberger saw that she was beautiful still.

  As Guddan and the three other ranis were carried closer to the pyre they removed their bracelets, and threw them to the numerous hands that stretched towards them. Honigberger kept his arms resolutely by his side.

  His fellow members of the Sikh durbar assured Honigberger that these ranis (four among Ranjit Singh’s seventeen wives) were willing participants in this age-old ritual. Nevertheless he felt sickened by what was about to unfold. These women were satis ,3 devoted to their husband in life and beyond, and their public suicide – or murder, depending on your point of view – was being celebrated all around him. The royal historian, Sohan Lal Suri, whose job it was to record events in Ranjit Singh’s court, would later report that the ranis had been willing victims, filled with unfettered joy as they dressed for their funeral, ‘dancing and laughing like intoxicated elephants’.4 Honigberger saw nothing of that in the wretched women’s faces.

  The maharaja’s head and shoulders had been placed on two of the ranis’ laps, to make it look as though he was sleeping, while the other two carried the weight of his torso. They sat perfectly still around his corpse, with their eyes tightly closed. Though they did not see the crown prince, Kharak Singh, carry the torch to the pyre, they would have felt his presence as he drew closer with the flames. If the women screamed, Honigberger could not tell. As the fire consumed them all, drums and the roar of the crowd confounded his senses. Honigberger was not the only one to be overwhelmed. A pair of pigeons, perhaps startled by the noise, flew into the climbing column of flames. Wings alight, they plummeted on to the pyre, causing the crowd to crescendo in a frenzy of ecstasy. It was said the birds were also willing satis for Ranjit Singh.5

  After the funeral pyre had burned for two days and nights, even after the last piece of sandalwood had crackled and crumbled, Honigberger was forced to maintain his vigil for almost twenty hours more. Senior members of Ranjit Singh’s court were expected to attend their master until the river took his ashes. When the mound was cool enough for calloused fingers, the Doms, a caste of sweepers who handle corpses, began their work. How they knew where the maharaja’s remains ended and his wives’ began was a mystery. For centuries, commoners and kings had passed through the Doms’ skilled fingers and their methods were never questioned. As they sorted the ash into five neat piles – for the maharaja and his queens – nobody seemed to care that the remains of seven slave girls were also mixed in with the powdered grey. Like the ranis, they too had burned with their maharaja. Unlike their mistresses, they had been expected to walk to their deaths on their own two feet.

  The sight of the slave girls cowering as a heavy oil-soaked reed mat was lowered over their heads would remain vivid in Honigberger’s mind for the rest of his life.6 Nobody mourned for them, and Honigberger did not even know their names. Consumed with revulsion, and a degree of self-pity, he watched the ‘abominable ceremony’.7 When asked later why he had not left Punjab before the funeral, Honigberger liked to quote the words of General Jean-François Allard, a friend and fellow European in Ranjit Singh’s court: ‘It is very difficult to get an appointment here, but still more so to get one’s dismissal …’8

  Back in 1829, at the age of thirty-four, Honigberger had been a fresh-faced physician from Imperial Austria, filled with unconventional ideas of how medicine ought to be practised. A well-travelled young man, he arrived in Lahore armed with a box full of tinctures and a letter of recommendation. Despite ambitiously high hopes, his progress was frustratingly slow. Maharaja Ranjit Singh refused to let the gora doctor anywhere near him, so instead Honigberger contented himself with treating minor officials on the periphery of the durbar. Only when enough of them survived was he summoned to the palace.

  Though Honigberger did not expect his first royal patient to be the maha
raja himself, he did at least expect that patient to be human. Instead a horse, a creature ‘of uncommon height’,9 was brought before the baffled physician. The stallion had been given as a token of friendship by King George IV of England and, though coddled in the royal stables, the beast had developed painful leg ulcers. Hakims had tried their best, but when their cures failed Honigberger was called in as a last hope. He worked hard to save the horse, but it died, convulsing at his feet. Such a result might have ended a man’s future in Lahore, yet something in the tenderness Honigberger had shown the stricken animal impressed Ranjit Singh. The maharaja granted the young doctor a position, allowing him to practise on humans and earn healthy rewards for his efforts. Despite his generosity, Honigberger secretly harboured an unflattering opinion of his benefactor, describing Ranjit Singh as a man of ‘very low stature’10 who, on horseback, looked like ‘an ape on an elephant’.11

  The maharaja even offered the doctor command of an artillery battalion. Other white men had proved very useful in Ranjit Singh’s army,12 and he had come to look upon them as lucky talismans. Honigberger shrewdly turned down the position: ‘I refused [the maharaja] deeming that I had not sufficient abilities to execute such an office properly …’13 Not one to be thwarted, the maharaja countered with a second proposition. In lieu of an active military post, he offered to make Honigberger superintendent of his royal gunpowder factory, a title which came with wealth and influence. Honigberger accepted, though secretly he never intended to stay in Punjab for long. He was homesick from the very start, and wanted to return to Europe: ‘I was so occupied by this idea, that if they had offered me the Koh-i-Noor to remain there for the remainder of my life, I would have refused it.’14

  Ten years had passed and he was serving at the pleasure of the durbar still.

  The men clearing the maharaja’s cremation site were permitted to keep any of the warm gems and heat-tortured gold they found in the ashes. Few begrudged them, especially since the one gem that truly mattered was safe from their grubbing fingers. Rumours about the Koh-i-Noor’s whereabouts swirled through the court like smoke. Some said it had been spirited away to Kashmir, while others claimed that the wily master of the toshakhana (royal treasury), Misr Beli Ram, had stolen it. The most persistent rumour concerned a Hindu deity in a far-off province. Apparently Lord Jagannath’s statue in Orissa would soon be wearing the Mountain of Light on its forehead like a priceless third eye.

  Many devout Hindus believed that the Koh-i-Noor was in fact the Syamantaka gem, closely associated with Lord Krishna in the legends of the Bhagavad Purana. Lord Krishna was an avatar of Lord Jagannath, therefore returning the gem to the deity would restore some balance to the universe – at least that was what the Brahmins surrounding Ranjit Singh told him. In the weeks leading up to the maharaja’s death they had been whispering almost constantly in Ranjit Singh’s ear, persuading him to swap his earthly riches for heavenly blessings. Though the maharaja was a Sikh, part of a religion that did not hold with such karmic bargaining, the Hindu priests still managed to convince him to part with a fortune in gold and jewels. Too weak to resist, he had been robbed of speech by a stroke, and by the end was capable only of nodding his head. With one such inclination Ranjit Singh was said to have given away the Koh-i-Noor to the Jagannath pundits.15 The Brahmin priests were understandably jubilant; the crown prince of Punjab less so.

  As the next in line, Ranjit’s eldest legitimate son, Kharak Singh, had grown up seeing his father with the Koh-i-Noor strapped to his bicep. The potential loss of such a prize was fraught with bitterness and Kharak Singh was not the only one left struggling with the deathbed bequest. Thousands of miles away in England, news of the Koh-i-Noor’s fate was also causing upheaval. Intelligence reports had been shuttling between Fort William in Calcutta and Whitehall in London.

  Since he arrived in Ludhiana in 1823, British agent Captain C. M. Wade had been keeping a close eye on the maharaja and regularly sending back intelligence reports to his masters in the East India Company. Though Wade learned of the maharaja’s death immediately, his official report took more than five months to reach British headquarters in the Bengal Presidency, thanks to unrest in the region blocking its progress en route. Wade’s letter finally arrived in Calcutta only on 4 December 1839: ‘Although the Right Honourable the Governor General will have received the melancholy intelligence of the demise of Maharajah Runjeet Singh before my report of that event can arrive, I deem it my duty to announce that His Highness expired at Lahore on the 27th of June.’ The letter suggested that the diamond had been sent to Orissa, as per the maharaja’s final wishes:

  During the last few days of his illness His Highness is declared to have bestowed in charity money, jewels and other property to the supposed value of fifty lakhs of Rupees. Among his jewels he directed the well-known Cohi nur diamond to be sent to the temple of Jagur nath. He observed that no one carrys away with him his worldly wealth and that such a bequest would perpetuate his name.16

  Though the intelligence was received by the ‘secret’ division of the Company’s foreign department in Calcutta, the matters disclosed were hardly classified. Word of the old Lion’s death had already made it into the British papers. As news of his demise sank in, attention turned to his legacy. What was he leaving behind? On 20 October 1839, an indignant letter appeared in the Era, a popular British weekly newspaper:

  So, Mr Editor, after many previous unfounded reports which have been in circulation for the last nine months past, it has been fully and officially confirmed that the Lion of the Punjaub is no more: – that fierce oppressor, so long, an eyesore to the East India company, is numbered with his departed ancestors, and the Koh-i-Noor Diamond or ‘Great Mountain of Light’ has been bequeathed, by the dying tyrant, to the pundits of the Juggernaut, wherewith to bedeck a senseless idol. The richest, the most costly gem in the known world, has been committed to the trust of a profane, idolatrous and mercenary priesthood …17

  The author called himself ‘A Voice from Cashmere’ and clearly had insider knowledge of the Sikh court. India crawled with invisible players of the Great Game; it is not clear whether ‘A Voice’ worked for the British government or for the East India Company, but one thing was certain: he was more than a little obsessed with the Koh-i-Noor, which he believed to be the key to the whole Kingdom of Punjab.

  ‘A Voice’ urged his countrymen to seize the moment and the fabled diamond: ‘Either the East India Company must tamely submit to the insolent appetite of “Khurruck Singh”, the present representative of the throne of Lahore, in his retaining possession of the above valuable prize, as a portion of his patrimony … or they must defend the claim of [Juggernaut] and commence hostilities against him.’

  Either way, ‘A Voice’ argued, the British must follow the diamond. He urged a swift British alliance with the crown prince. With the loss of the Koh-i-Noor imminent, English laws of inheritance would look attractive to Kharak Singh. They automatically made the diamond his property, superseding any spurious deathbed bequest of Ranjit Singh: ‘if the Company could even persuade “Khurruck Singh” that English law must pass current in the Lahore country as well as in the ceded provinces of Hindoostan’, he maintained, everything else would follow smoothly. Kharak Singh would open the door to British jurisprudence, then to British influence; and when the time was right, he would have no power to resist British domination. To make the proposal more attractive to Kharak Singh, continued ‘A Voice’, agents could offer to harass the Jagannath priests, forcing them to give up their claim of their own volition:

  The priests are the immediate dependents of the Company … Who furnishes, let me ask, the necessary paraphernalia to support the pageantry attendant upon the festivals of the idol of Juggernaut? The East India Company!! Who endows the Temple of Juggernaut with large grants of land? The East India Company!! Who is it that employs agents to drive in force from their peasant homesteads the poor, wretched, half-starved to the abominable city of juggernaut during their Ruthyatra?
The East India Company.

  The British were excellently placed to win the crown prince’s gratitude. In the letter-writer’s estimation, the Lion’s son and heir Kharak Singh was an intemperate weakling, and this was a good thing: Kharak Singh’s shortcomings would make it easy to prise the Koh-i-Noor away. If the gem ever went to Jagannath, it would fall into the hands of saffron-clad thieves and be lost to Britain for ever. ‘A Voice’ warned the British that the priests would simply sell the stone to the highest bidder and benefit from the proceeds. ‘Would the wary Brahmins long suffer the Koh-i-Noor to bedeck the hobgoblin effigy of the idol to whom it was bequeathed?’ he asked; ‘the dazzling gem, which once graced the mighty arm of the “lion of the Punjaub” and which previously added weight and dignity to the house of Caboul, will be substituted by some valueless glass ball, as a miserable trophy of Hindoo credulity and superstition …’

  Though his letter was peppered with derisory comments about Indians, some of the writer’s assessments were factually accurate. Kharak Singh was a weak and greedy man, and even the nobles of his court regarded him as a fool. Frequently drunk, the crown prince was more interested in wine and women than in matters of state. He imbibed copious amounts of opium and had little time for royal advisers. The prospect of serving such a man did not sit easy with the durbar. To those who knew the inner workings of Lahore, the plan put forward by ‘A Voice’ was not implausible. However the British never had the chance to implement this plan, or any other. Weeks before the Era published the letter, the Koh-i-Noor’s fate had already been decided – by a mere servant of the Sikh court.

  The master of the toshakhana, Misr Beli Ram, had served Ranjit Singh as guardian of the jewel-house for decades. He was one of the most trusted and respected men in all Lahore. Beli Ram’s father had served in the toshakhana before him, and four of his brothers held high positions in the Imperial army. It was hard to find a family more dedicated to the maharaja.