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The Koh-i-Noor: the world’s most infamous diamond

The Koh-i-Noor is the world’s most infamous diamond. Today it sits peacefully spotlit against the purple velvet of the Queen Mother’s crown in a display case in the Tower of London. In the fairly recent past, though, it has been the cause of quite remarkable violence, and its recorded history is littered with owners who have been blinded, poisoned, tortured to death, burned in oil, threatened with drowning, crowned in molten lead, relieved of their genitals, bludgeoned to death with bricks and stabbed to death by members of their own family. Koh-i-Noor means “Mountain of Light” in Persian but its passage through the world was marked with a succession of acts of remarkable darkness. Wherever it has gone, it has provoked greed and envy, created dissension and division, and brought out the worst in almost all its owners.

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Until the discovery of diamond mines in Brazil in 1725, all the world’s diamonds came from India (with the sole exception of a few black diamond crystals found in Borneo). 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 host rocks 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. Rarely, however, a diamond as large as a hen’s egg would be found. One such was the Koh-i-Noor. As to when it was mined, or exactly where, it is impossible to tell, though the most likely source is the Golconda diamond fields between Hyderabad and the Carnatic coast.

Although it is made of the earth’s hardest substance, the Koh-i-Noor has always attracted an airily insubstantial fog of mythology around it. When Lord Dalhousie, the British governor-general, first seized the gem from the 10-year-old Sikh Maharaja Duleep Singh following the East India Company’s conquest of the Punjab in 1849, he commissioned a report on the stone’s history. Its author was instructed “to collect and to record as much accurate and interesting information regarding the Koh-i-Noor” from the jewellers and courtiers in Delhi as possible. But as the gem had been stolen from its Mughal owners in Delhi during a Persian invasion a full 110 years earlier, the job was not easy. Even the report’s author admitted he could gather little more than tittle-tattle.

The report, which still exists in the vaults of the National Archives of India, sketched out for the first time what would become the accepted history of the Koh-i-Noor: a centuries-long chain of bloody conquests and acts of pillage, looting and seizure. This version of events has since been repeated in article after article, book after book, and sits unchallenged on Wikipedia today.

Shortly after the report was delivered, the Koh-i-Noor was despatched to England where Queen Victoria lent it to the Great Exhibition of 1851. Long queues – in all some three million people, 10 per cent of the British population – snaked through the Crystal Palace to see this celebrated trophy locked away in its glass safe, itself contained within a metal cage. Trumpeted by the British press and besieged by the public, the Koh-i-Noor quickly became not only the most famous diamond in the world but also the single most famous object of loot from India, a symbol of Victorian Britain’s imperial domination of the world.

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As the fame of the diamond grew, and as Dalhousie’s lively but entirely unsubstantiated version of the stone’s history circulated with it, the many other large Mughal diamonds that once rivalled the Koh-i-Noor came to be almost forgotten, and the Mountain of Light achieved a singular status as the greatest gem in the world.

Only a few historians remembered that the diamond, which weighed 190.3 metric carats when it arrived in Britain, had had at least two comparable sisters in the Mughal treasury – the Darya-i-Noor, or Sea of Light, now in Tehran (today estimated at 175-195 metric carats), and the Great Mughal Diamond, believed by most modern gemologists to be the Orlov diamond (189.9 metric carats), today part of Catherine the Great’s imperial Russian sceptre in the Kremlin.

It was in the early 19th century, when the Koh-i-Noor reached the Punjab and the hands of the Sikh maharaja Ranjit Singh, that the diamond began to achieve its pre-eminent fame and celebrity. This was partly the result of Singh’s preference for diamonds over rubies – a taste Sikhs tended to share with most Hindus, but not with the Mughals or Persians, who preferred large, uncut, brightly coloured stones.

The growing status of the gem was also partly a consequence of the rapidly growing price of diamonds worldwide in the early 19th century. This followed the invention of the “brilliant cut”, which fully released the “fire” inherent within every diamond, and led in turn to the emerging middle-class fashion for diamond engagement rings – a taste that was eventually refracted back to India.

The final act in the Koh-i-Noor’s rise to global stardom took place in the aftermath of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the massive press coverage it engendered. Before long, huge, often cursed Indian diamonds began to make regular appearances in Victorian novels such as Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone and Benjamin Disraeli’s Lothair.

As the many other great Mughal diamonds have come to be forgotten by all except specialists, the Koh-i-Noor’s mythology has grown ever more remarkable, ever more mythic – and ever more shakily fictitious.

When my co-author Anita Anand and I tried to establish the hard facts of the Koh-i-Noor’s history, we found that unambiguous early references to this most celebrated of gems are almost suspiciously thin on the ground. Indeed, contrary to what is written in almost every existing history of the gem, there is actually no 100 per cent certain reference to the Koh-i-Noor in any medieval Delhi Sultanate or Mughal source, despite a huge number of textual references to outsized diamonds appearing throughout Indian history, particularly towards the climax of Mughal rule.

Some of these may well refer to the Koh-i-Noor but, lacking sufficiently detailed descriptions, it is impossible to be certain. Frustrating as it is, we simply do not know the origin of the Koh-i-Noor and have no hard information as to when, how or where it entered Mughal hands. We only know for sure how it left them.

The Persian historian Muhammad Kazim Marvi makes what seems to be the first extant, solid, named reference to the stone in his history of the Persian warlord Nadir Shah’s invasion of India in 1739. This was written as late as the mid-1740s, a decade or so after the gem had been taken away from India.

Significantly, Marvi’s is the only contemporary chronicle, among a dozen or so detailed accounts left by Persian, Indian, French and Dutch witnesses, specifically to mention the great diamond by name, although most give detailed lists of Shah’s bejewelled loot. According to Marvi, the Koh-i-Noor was then attached to the head of one of the peacocks on Shah Jahan’s Peacock Throne.

So it was that the Koh-i-Noor achieved in exile a singular global status it had never achieved before leaving its Indian homeland. Today, tourists who see it in the Tower of London are often surprised by how small it is, especially when compared with the two much larger Cullinan diamonds kept in the same showcase: at present it is only the 90th biggest diamond in the world.

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As well as the British crown, four other governments claim the Koh-i-Noor: India, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. These different contemporary claims mirror the historical passage of the gem from the Golconda riverbed to the 17th-century Mughal throne in Delhi, and hence to 18th-century Persia, then late 18th-century Afghanistan and, finally, via Ranjit Singh’s early 19th-century Sikh Kingdom of Lahore, to the Tower of London.

The first post-colonial claim on the diamond was made by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the ninth prime minister of Pakistan, in August 1976. On the eve of Pakistan’s Independence Day celebrations, Bhutto wrote to James Callaghan, the British prime minister, and demanded the return of the gem. 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.

It took Callaghan about a month to reply, but when he did the answer was a firm no. 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. 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, the then high commissioner for India in London, again 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 in terms of state-sponsored theft. Nayar insisted the rightful claim was India’s and India’s alone. The Indian government still maintains that it will try and get the diamond back one way or another. The British government remains equally 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. Another alternative would be to cut up the stone: after all, when it first arrived in London it was given a European brilliant cut, which halved its size from 190.3 metric carats to 93 metric carats.

Now, it has been suggested, it could be cut up again, and a piece given to all those countries who make a credible argument for its return. But it is most unlikely that such Solomonic wisdom would ever be entertained by the British, nor would it satisfy any of the various parties involved.

The question of whether the Koh-i-Noor was cursed, or not, was something that greatly exercised the proudly rational Victorians. Lord Dalhousie firmly believed that it was not, and used to quote its last Afghan owner, 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 of history.

Yet many of the diamond’s owners – Shah Shuja among them – have suffered in appalling ways. Even inanimate objects associated with the gem seem to be struck down – witness the cholera epidemic and storms that scythed through the passengers and crew of the Medea, a steam sloop that brought the Koh-i-Noor to England.

Although it was not the largest diamond in Mughal hands – the Darya-i-Noor and Great Mughal diamonds were probably both originally around the same weight – 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 post-colonial demands for compensation, and set in motion the repeated attempts that have been made to have it returned to its various former homes.

The story of the Koh-i-Noor raises not only important historical issues but contemporary ones too, being in many ways a touchstone for attitudes towards colonialism, posing 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?

The diamond is oddly absent from Mughal records and only really achieved worldwide fame when it was shown in the Great Exhibition. It was the Victorians themselves who turned it into a symbol of Britain’s imperial domination of the world – something that has now come to haunt their post-colonial successors. Few today would disagree that Jewish art looted from its owners during the Nazi Holocaust of the 1940s should be returned, but Indian gems and art treasures taken in the 1840s tend to be treated as a very different case, especially by the more rightwing British historians.

When news broke last year that a group of Bollywood celebrities were suing the crown for the stone’s return, the historian Andrew Roberts told readers of the Mail on Sunday how lucky Indians were to have been colonised. “Those involved in this ludicrous case,” he wrote, “should recognise that the British Crown Jewels is precisely the right place for the Koh-i-Noor diamond to reside, in grateful recognition for over three centuries of British involvement in India, which led to the modernisation, development, protection, agrarian advance, linguistic unification and ultimately the democratisation of the subcontinent.”

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What is certain is that nothing in the immediate future is likely to prise this diamond from its display case in the Tower of London. Last seen in public on the coffin of the Queen Mother, it awaits a new Queen Consort, and one day may well sit on the head of Queen Camilla, wife of a future King Charles III. Given the diamond’s violent and often tragic history, someone of superstitious temperament might wonder whether this is good news for the future of the monarchy. Nearly 300 years after Nadir 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 has apparently lost none of its power to provoke discord, and at very best seems to bring mixed fortunes to whoever wears it, wherever it goes.