Koh-i-Noor

by William Dalrymple

  In 1947 the government of a newly independent India asked for the return of the Koh-i-Noor. Simultaneously, the Congress ministry of Orissa made its own claim, citing the deathbed bequest of Maharaja Ranjit Singh to the Jagannath Temple in Puri. Both demands were dealt with curtly. The British government stated that the diamond had been formally presented to the then sovereign, Queen Victoria, by its rightful owner, the maharaja of Lahore. To draw a line under the matter, the government added that this situation was ‘non-negotiable’.

  At the time of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, when the Koh-i-Noor made its appearance in her mother’s crown, India put forward another request, perhaps hoping the new sovereign would be more amenable. That too was turned down flatly.

  In 1976, Britain experienced its hottest summer since records began. Water was rationed, and hospitals placed on alert due to a spike in emergency admissions and a 20 per cent increase in ‘excess deaths’. The hot weather also gave rise to a plague of ladybirds, usually friendly-looking insects with distinctive crimson and black-spotted backs. Some twenty-four billion of them swarmed across the skies as crops failed and tinder-dry forest caught fire. Staff at the House of Commons, forbidden from taking off their distinctive green jackets despite the temperatures, made history when they walked out in disgust, and the clock of Big Ben suffered its first and only major breakdown. Its chimes were silent for three weeks, adding to the growing feeling that some dark power had Britain in its grasp.

  In August of that same year, on the eve of Pakistan’s Independence Day celebrations, as temperatures in London climbed to their highest levels yet, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the prime minister of Pakistan, wrote to James Callaghan, his British counterpart, and demanded the return of the Koh-i-Noor. His claim was based on the belief that the jewel was part of Lahore’s heritage, having been taken from the treasure house of that city.

  In his letter, the Pakistani premier decried the disappearance of ‘the unique treasures which are the flesh and blood of Pakistan’s heritage’. The Koh-i-Noor’s return to Pakistan ‘would be a convincing demonstration of the spirit that moved Britain voluntarily to shed its imperial encumbrances and lead the process of decolonisation’. Bhutto added that the diamond’s repatriation ‘would be symbolic of a new international equity strikingly different from the grasping, usurping temper of a former age’.

  The claim had come completely out of the blue and gave an already sweltering government even more reason to perspire. It took Callaghan about a month to reply, but when he did, the answer was a firm no once again. He said that ‘explicit provision’ had been made for the Koh-i-Noor’s ‘transfer to the British Crown … in the peace treaty with the Maharajah of Lahore, which concluded the war of 1849’. He went on: ‘In the light of the confused past history of the Koh-i-Noor diamond, the clear British title to it and the multiplicity of claims which would undoubtedly be made to it if its future were ever thought to be in doubt, I could not advise Her Majesty the Queen that it should be surrendered to any other country.’

  Civil servants opened a file on the matter, and Bhutto’s letter and Callaghan’s uncompromising reply were placed inside. A potted history of the Koh-i-Noor was also added, in which a Whitehall scribe noted that the queen mother had worn the diamond fairly recently at the coronation of her daughter. ‘I thought it was very awkward!’ scribbled Callaghan.

  Bhutto might have pursued the matter further had he not been deposed in a military coup a year later, and hanged two years after that.

  In 1990, Kuldip Nayar, then high commissioner for India in London, raised the question of the Koh-i-Noor’s return. Like Bhutto, he condemned the way in which the diamond had been appropriated, describing it as state-sponsored theft. Nayar insisted that the rightful claim was India’s and India’s alone. As he would later recall:

  During my short stint in the U.K., I found that the British would be embarrassed whenever I talked to them about the Kohinoor. When I visited the Tower of London with my family to see Indian diamonds, including the Kohinoor … British officials, who showed us around, were very apologetic. They said: ‘We feel ashamed to show them [diamonds] because they are from your country.’ I recall the remark, which our old servant, Murli, made after seeing the diamonds: ‘We must take back the Kohinoor when we return to India.’ His words reflected the popular Indian opinion.3

  Nayar’s request too went nowhere. When he became a member of the Rajya Sabha (India’s upper house in Parliament) in 2000, he raised the issue again:

  I got a petition signed by some 50 M.P.s – Opposition leader Manmohan Singh was one of them – to request the Government of India to ask the British government to return the Kohinoor. Jaswant Singh, the then Foreign Minister, assured me that the government would take up the matter with London forthwith. I presumed that he had done so.4

  It later transpired that he had done no such thing.

  The Koh-i-Noor had turned from an ancient gem with legendary powers into a live diplomatic grenade. After Bhutto and Nayar, neither the Indian nor the Pakistani government seemed keen to jeopardise relations with Great Britain over the Koh-i-Noor. All other attempts to repatriate the diamond have been instigated by members of the public, often to the embarrassment and irritation of those who sit in Delhi and Islamabad.

  Calls to give back ‘the stolen diamond’ were not restricted to India and Pakistan either. In November 2000, the Taliban demanded that Queen Elizabeth hand the Koh-i-Noor to them, ‘as soon as possible’. Presumably, they wished to display it in the bombed-out museum of Kabul. The Taliban’s foreign affairs spokesman, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, insisted that the diamond was the ‘legitimate property’ of Afghanistan, adding that ‘many other things’ stolen from Afghanistan during the colonial period should be returned in order for the Taliban to reconstruct their war-torn country. Faiz went on: ‘The history of the diamond shows it was taken from us to India, and from there to Britain. We have a much better claim than the Indians.’ Unsurprisingly, nothing came of the Taliban request, and no further approach has been made by the Afghan government.

  Indians and Pakistanis, in contrast, have not given up. Every so often an event will stoke their zeal once more. In 2002, Britain’s queen mother died and her crown, containing the Koh-i-Noor, was placed on her coffin as she lay in state. This time British Sikhs took to the airwaves to condemn the flaunting of ‘stolen goods’ right under their noses. There were demands for the diamond to be returned to the Golden Temple in Amritsar, because, as one caller to a phone-in put it, ‘the diamond belonged to a Sikh maharaja, and India did not even exist as a sovereign nation in those days’.5

  Time has done nothing to dampen the passions of Indians and Pakistanis wanting the jewel back. In 2010, David Cameron, the then prime minister, made an official visit to Punjab. He was confronted by the Indian media, which suggested that by giving back the diamond, Britain could begin to atone for its exploitation of India during the Raj. ‘If you say yes to one you suddenly find the British Museum would be empty,’ explained the prime minister, perhaps having in mind the controversies surrounding the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles. ‘I am afraid to say, it is going to have to stay put.’

  It does not seem to matter how many British prime ministers say no, nor how many times they say it, the Koh-i-Noor continues to attract claims, with 2015 being a particularly active year.

  In July, a group calling themselves the ‘Mountain of Light’ announced their intention to sue the British Crown for the return of the diamond. The consortium, made up of businessmen and Bollywood actors, said they would make their claim under the common law doctrine of ‘trespass to goods’, arguing that the British government had wrongfully taken possession of the diamond. If need be, they would be taking their claim to the international courts. Actress Bhumika Singh, part of the consortium, said: ‘The Koh-i-Noor is not just a 105-carat stone but part of our history and culture and should undoubtedly be returned.’6

  The campaign received the whole-hearted support of Keith Vaz,
the son of Goan parents, and then a senior British MP in the House of Commons. ‘These are genuine grievances which must be addressed. Pursuing monetary reparations is complex, time-consuming and potentially fruitless, but there is no excuse for not returning precious items such as the Koh-i-Noor diamond, a campaign I have backed for many years,’ said Vaz.

  His comments came just as Narendra Modi prepared for a three-day state visit to Britain. ‘What a wonderful moment it would be, if and when Prime Minister Modi finishes his visit, which is much overdue, he returns to India with the promise of the diamond’s return,’ said Vaz.

  The Modi visit came and went in November 2015, and the prime minister refrained from raising the issue of the diamond in his many speaking and media appearances around the country. Despite his diplomatic silence, just weeks later, in December, the Koh-i-Noor was in the news again. A Pakistani citizen had approached the Lahore High Court asking it to help him get the Koh-i-Noor back for his own country. In his petition, Jawaid Iqbal Jaffrey described the Koh-i-Noor as a ‘Pakistan asset’ in ‘illegal possession’ of Britain.

  According to a report in one British newspaper, ‘In the last half-century, Mr Jaffrey has written more than 786 letters to the Queen and various Pakistani officials asking for the diamond’s return. His High Court petition notes that his letters have never been acknowledged, except once by the Queen through her principal private secretary.’7 The newspaper might not have realised the significance of 786, but Muslims all over the world would have seen it. The Arabic letters of the opening words of the Quran, ‘Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim’ (In the name of Allah, the most Merciful, the most Beneficent), add up to the numerical value 786.8

  Not even the invocation of Allah could move the British on this matter, and since no formal governmental request had been made, the authorities shrugged off these demands with ease. In 2016, the stakes became somewhat higher.

  In April that year, the Indian government found itself in the middle of a cyclonic controversy. An Indian NGO had filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to direct the Indian government to bring back the diamond. Representing the government, the solicitor general, Ranjit Kumar, said it was pointless to pursue such a claim since the Koh-i-Noor was ‘neither stolen nor forcibly taken’. Instead Kumar suggested that the diamond had been ‘gifted’ to the East India Company by Ranjit Singh in 1849. With one simple statement he opened the floodgates, and a number of old wounds. A deluge of mockery followed. How could Ranjit Singh have handed over the diamond, unless he had done so through astral projection? He had been dead for a decade. The notion of it being a ‘gift’ was also dissected, as the sorry saga of the deposed boy king was repeatedly examined on the twenty-four-hour news cycle. Acres of print and opinion were published on the way in which the diamond had been appropriated. The conclusion of the Indian media was straightforward. There was no way this was a gift.

  Hours later, the Indian government seemed to perform a volte face. In a statement issued to the press, the Ministry of Culture distanced itself from the solicitor general’s comments: ‘The government of India further reiterates its resolve to make all possible efforts to bring back the Kohinoor diamond in an amicable manner …’ The ministry added that the diamond was a ‘valued piece of art with strong roots in our nation’s history’ and that Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, was determined to bring it back.

  In September 2016, the government submitted an affidavit to the court. It stated that it did not believe it had legal grounds to pursue a return, but might resort to diplomatic means to seek its retrieval from Britain. It stressed that according to India’s Antiquities and Art Treasures Act 1972, the country of origin of an antique could not invoke its right of retrieval if the article had left the country before the law came into force. In addition, the UNESCO convention, the affidavit said, could not come to the Indian government’s aid since the convention was signed by Britain and India long after the diamond had been taken from Duleep Singh.

  So the impasse continues. The Indian government maintains that it will try and bring the diamond back one way or another. The British government remains adamant that the stone is staying in London.

  What should happen to this supposedly cursed diamond? Some have suggested creating a museum for the stone at the Wagah border between India and Pakistan, a unique institution, accessible from both sides. Others have suggested that it be cut up once again and a piece each given to all those countries that make a credible argument for its return – including modern-day Iran and Afghanistan. But it is most unlikely that such Solomonic wisdom would ever be entertained by the British, nor indeed would it satisfy any of the various parties involved.

  The question of whether or not the Koh-i-Noor was cursed greatly exercised the proudly rational Victorians. As we have seen, Lord Dalhousie firmly believed that the great diamond was not cursed, and he used to quote Shah Shuja who told Ranjit Singh that it brought only good fortune ‘as those who possess it have it in their power to subdue their enemies’. He pointed out that the diamond had belonged to some of the luckiest, richest and most powerful monarchs in history and scoffed at the notion that a curse was even possible.

  Yet as this story also shows, many owners of the Koh-i-Noor – Shah Shuja among them – have indeed suffered in the most appalling ways. Its owners have variously been blinded, slow-poisoned, tortured to death, burned in oil, threatened with drowning, crowned with molten lead, assassinated by their own family and bodyguards, or have lost their kingdoms and died in penury. Even inanimate objects associated with the gem seem to have been struck down – witness the cholera epidemic and storms that nearly sank Medea as it brought the Koh-i-Noor to England, scything through passengers and crew.

  Although it was not the largest diamond in Mughal hands – the Darya-i-Nur and the Great Mughal diamond were probably both originally around the same weight, and today, after Prince Albert’s cut, there are at least eighty-nine diamonds larger than the Koh-i-Noor – it retains a fame and celebrity unmatched by any of its larger or more perfect rivals. This more than anything else has made it the focus of recent demands for compensation for colonial looting, and set in motion the repeated attempts to have it returned to its various former homes.

  The story of the Koh-i-Noor continues to raise not only important historical issues but contemporary ones too, being in many ways a lightning rod for attitudes towards colonialism. The diamond’s very presence in the Tower of London poses the question: what is the proper response to imperial looting? Do we simply shrug it off as part of the rough-and-tumble of history or should we attempt to right the wrongs of the past?

  What is certain is that nothing in the immediate future is likely to prise this diamond from its display case. It awaits a new queen consort, and one day it may well sit on the head of Queen Camilla, wife of the future King Charles III. But given the diamond’s violent and often tragic history, she, indeed the very monarchy itself, may well want to avoid the risk.

  For nearly 300 years after Nader Shah carried the great diamond away from Delhi, fracturing the Mughal Empire as he did so, and 170 years after it first came into British hands, the Koh-i-Noor, like the legendary Syamantaka gem before it, has lost none of its power to create division and dissension. At its very best, it seems to bring mixed fortunes to whoever wears it, wherever it goes.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1.Papers Relating to the Punjab 1847–9, London, 1849, f. 693.

  2.James Andrew Broun Ramsay, Marquess of Dalhousie, Private Letters, London, 1911, p. 62.

  3.Dalhousie to Hobhouse, 9 April 1849. In Michael Alexander and Sushila Anand, Queen Victoria’s Maharajah: Duleep Singh 1838–93, London, 1980, p. 13.

  4.Sir Penderel Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, London, 1990, p. 616.

  5.Christy Campbell, The Maharajah’s Box, London, 2000, pp. 40–2.

  6.National Archives of India, Foreign Dept, Political, Foreign 1849 Dept Pol Consultation 22 Dec, No. 11. Orders for t
he collection of information about the history of the Koh-i-Noor.

  7.Ibid.

  8.National Archives of India, Foreign Dept, Political, 1850, 14 June No. 72, item 14. Theophilus Metcalfe to Sir Henry Elliot, 7 January 1849.

  9.I go by the figures given in Ian Balfour, Famous Diamonds, London, 2009; and Anna Malecka, ‘The Great Mughal and the Orlov: One and the Same Diamond’, Journal of Gemmology 35, no. 1 (2016): 56–63.

  10.At least judging by the table in Balfour, Famous Diamonds, pp. 320–1. There have apparently been a rash of new large diamond discoveries in South Africa since Balfour drew up his table of diamond sizes, so it is quite possible that the Koh-i-Noor now ranks below 100.

  11.Mohammad Kazem Marvi, Alam Ara-ye Naderi (three volumes), edited by Mohammad Amin Riyahi, Tehran (third edition), 1374/1995, Vol. 2, p. 739n.

  1.THE INDIAN PREHISTORY OF THE KOH-I-NOOR

  1.Borneo became quite a major source of diamonds in the seventeenth century – indeed, the East India Company were exploiting Borneo diamonds prior to the Indian ones. See Jack M. Ogden, Diamonds, Head Hunters and a Prattling Fool: The British Exploitation of Borneo Diamonds in Gems and Jewellery, September 2005, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 67–9.

  2.Godehard Lenzen, The History of Diamond Production and the Diamond Trade, London, 1970, pp. 1–7. See also P. J. Lu, Y. Nan Yao, J. F. So, G. E. Harlow, J. Lu, G. Wang, and P. M. Chaikin, Earliest Use of Corundum and Diamond in Prehistoric China in Archaeometry, 2005, Vol. 47, pp. 1–12.

  3.The Garuda Purana, primary source edition, edited and translated by Manmatha Nath Dutt, Calcutta, 1908.

  4.Raja Sourindro Mohum Tagore, Mani-masa or A Treatise on Gems, Calcutta, 1881, Pt 1, p. 17.

  5.Bhagavad Purana, Chapter 56, ‘The Syamantaka Jewel’. Also in Tagore, Mani-masa, Pt 1, p. 9.

  6.Tagore, Mani-masa, Pt 1, p. 17.