The Weekend Australian of 15 and 16 July, exactly a month before the seventieth anniversary of the dual Independence, featured three articles about the subcontinent: a review of The Black Prince, a new film about Duleep Singh, the last Sikh maharaja to rule the Punjab and from whom the British took the Koh-i-Noor; John Zubrzycki’s positive review of Koh-i-Noor; and an article by William Dalrymple titled ‘Crown Jewel: The Koh-i-Noor remains a symbol of the British Raj in contradictory ways’.

Koh-i-Noor is written in two parts: ‘The Jewel in the Throne’ by Dalrymple, the latest in his brilliantly readable surveys of Indian history; and ‘The Jewel in the Crown’, India’s special designation within the British Empire, by Anita Anand. A journalist, Anand is the daughter of Indian parents whose Punjabi families migrated to the United Kingdom after Partition. Her first book, Sophia: Princess, suffragette, revolutionary (2015), is the biography of a granddaughter of Duleep Singh. In her author’s note, Anand mentions being taken to see the Koh-i-Noor as a child of six. Her father spoke of the loss of the gem with such passion that ‘the diamond had burned bright’ in her imagination ever since.

The first historical research of the diamond was by Theo Metcalfe, a junior assistant magistrate in Delhi in 1850, just before the diamond was dispatched to Queen Victoria by Lord Dalhousie, Britain’s governor-general in India, who wrested the diamond from the ten-year-old king Duleep Singh. Metcalfe, while interested in gems, was no scholar; even he saw the weakness of his report. Informed by gem merchants, his anecdotal history encompassed 5,000 years from stories of the Hindu God Lord Krishna to more recent centuries of barbarous murder, looting, and conquest. Growing ever more mythic and fictitious, it remained unchallenged until now, almost 170 years on. Previously untranslated Persian and Afghan sources, accounts by European travellers and Sikh chronicles unknown to Metcalfe, illuminate the new history.

The Koh-i-Noor is not ‘the largest diamond in the world’ as Victoria wrote in her eight-page diary entry on the day she first saw it. Unimpressed by the gem, she wrote at greater length about the death of Sir Robert Peel. The diamond in its present form is only ninetieth on the list of biggest and best, but in terms of fascination it must be supreme.

A sketch of Koh-i-Noor in its original setting as part of the armlet given to Queen Victoria in 1851 (Wikimedia Commons)

Victoria’s mood was brighter in 1851 at Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition in Hyde Park’s Crystal Palace, the glittering building compared to the diamond, its most important exhibit. Representing the exoticism of the British Empire in the East and the major trophy of imperial military might, it was displayed within a cage, surely a metaphor for British dominance. Dull in captivity, it did not glitter, and many were disappointed. An improved display cabin showed the diamond to greater advantage, but the fiendish heat within made visitors swoon. The result a year later was drastic recutting at Garrard & Co’s Haymarket workshop, where, after the duke of Wellington’s symbolic first cut, the diamond’s mass was diminished by half at a cost of £8,000 – £1,000,000 in today’s money. The Iron Duke died eight weeks later. He was aged eighty-three, so the legendary curse of the diamond could not quite be blamed.

Leaping ahead to the Victorians bypasses the fascinating though often ghastly earlier history of the Koh-i-Noor, the Mountain of Light. Struggles for empire saw duplicity, torture, and death. Mughal, Persian, Afghan, Sikh, and British rulers viewed the priceless diamond as a supreme symbol of dominance and stopped at little to possess it. Its display was designed to impress.

Queen Alexandra wearing the Koh-i-noor in her coronation crown, 9 August 1902 (Wikimedia Commons)Emperor Akbar called foreigners ‘an assemblage of savages’, and ‘loot’ is one Indian word to enter and remain in the English language. The East India Company, an assemblage which Dalrymple calls ‘the original corporate raiders’, represented British suzerainty until 1858, profiting hugely from Indian loot. Koh-i-Noor, the paramount piece of loot, the ‘ancient gem with legendary powers’, has in modern times turned ‘into a live diplomatic grenade’. India, Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan have all claimed ownership and repatriation since 1947, unsurprisingly refused by Britain. A Solomonic solution was suggested, not halving the baby but quartering the diamond. Solomon, as exemplary Quranic ruler and prophet king, was referenced in 1628 when Emperor Shah Jahan commissioned the Peacock Throne, the most magnificent jewelled object ever created, costing double the amount of the Taj Mahal. It provided one of the first credible references to the Koh-i-Noor which graced the throne’s baldachin, set in the head of an ornamental peacock.

No longer ornamenting the armlet of an Oriental potentate, the Koh-i-Noor is set in what is called the Queen Mother’s Crown. Its exhibition at the Tower of London continues, perhaps insensitively, a version of darshan, a Sanskrit word meaning ‘viewing’ of a deity, revered person, or sacred object.