Kohinoor: The Story of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond

by William Dalrymple

The East India Company, the world’s first really global multinational, had grown over the course of little more than a century from an operation employing only thirty-five permanent staff, headquartered in one small office in the city of London, into the most powerful and heavily militarized corporation in history: its army by 1800 was twice the size of that of Britain.

Until the discovery of diamond mines in Brazil in 1725, with the sole exception of a few black diamond crystals found in the mountains of Borneo, all the world’s diamonds came from India. 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 the host rocks – kimberlite and lamproite – 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. Very occasionally, however, a diamond as large as a hen’s egg would be found. One such was the Koh-i-Noor.

As he noted in the Baburnama, when his son Humayun captured the family of Bikramjit, the raja of Gwalior, who were in Agra at the time of Ibrahim Lodhi’s defeat, ‘they made him a voluntary offering of a mass of jewels and valuables, amongst which was the famous diamond which [Sultan] Ala’ ud-Din [Khalji] must have brought. Its reputation is that every appraiser has estimated its value at two and half days food for the whole world. Apparently it weighs 8 misqals.’2 Another contemporary source, a small treatise on precious stones dedicated to Babur and Humayun, also refers to Babur’s diamond: ‘No private individual has ever seen such a diamond, or heard of it, nor is there any mention of it in any book.’3 These two mentions are often assumed to be early references to the Koh-i-Noor. They may well be – or not: the description is too vague to be certain, and there were clearly several very large diamonds circulating in India at this time; but it is certainly a possibility. Either way, Babur’s diamond soon left India. Babur died in 1530, only four years after his arrival in India, and before he could consolidate his new conquests. His dreamy and somewhat feckless son, Humayun, shared his father’s poetic and cultural interests, but he had none of his military genius. He continued to build gardens and spent his days rapt in the study of astrology and mysticism, but his father’s conquests crumbled and in 1540, after less than ten years on the throne, Humayun was forced into exile ...

The Mughals brought with them from Central Asia a very different set of ideas about gemstones to those then held in India. These ideas derived from the philosophy, aesthetics and literature of the Persian world. Here it was not diamonds but ‘red stones of light’ that were given pre-eminence.10 In Persian literature such stones were prized as symbols of the divine in metaphysics and of the highest reaches of the sublime in art, evoking the light of dusk – shafaq – that fills the sky immediately after the sun has set. As Ferdowsi writes in his great Shah-Nama, or Book of Kings: When the sun gave the world the colour of the spinel, Dark night set foot on the celestial vault.11 Garcia da Orto is explicit that diamonds were not regarded as the pre-eminent gemstone by the Mughals – something which came as an enormous surprise to Europeans. In his Colloquies, da Orto has his interlocutor, Dr Ruano, remark that diamonds ‘are the king of stones, for it has eminence over pearls and emeralds and rubies, if we believe Pliny’. Da Orto, however, corrects him: ‘In this country… they think more of an emerald or of a ruby, which have more value if they are perfect, and size for size, than of a diamond. But as they do not find other stones when perfect and of good water so large as diamonds, it happens that they often fetch a higher price. The value of the stones is no more than the will of buyers and the need for them.’

Moreover, the Mughals were not just enthusiasts of the arts; by the height of Akbar’s reign they also had unrivalled resources with which to patronize them. They ruled over five times the population commanded by their only rivals, the Ottomans – some 100 million subjects, controlling almost all of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as eastern Afghanistan. Their capitals were the megacities of their day: ‘They are second to none either in Asia or in Europe,’ thought the Jesuit Father Antonio Monserrate, ‘with regards either to size, population, or wealth. Their cities are crowded with merchants, who gather there from all over Asia. There is no art or craft which is not practiced there.’ For their grubby contemporaries in the West, stumbling around in their codpieces, the silk-clad Mughals, dripping in jewels, were the living embodiment of wealth and power – a meaning that has remained impregnated in the word ‘mogul’ ever since. In a letter from the court of Emperor Jahangir to the future King Charles I, Sir Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador to the court of the great Mughal, reported in 1616 that he had entered a world of almost unimaginable splendour. The emperor, he wrote, was: clothed, or rather laden with diamonds, rubies, pearls, and other precious vanities, so great, so glorious! His head, necke, breast, armes, above the elbowes, at the wrists, his fingers each one with at least two or three rings, are fettered with chaines of dyamonds, rubies as great as w...

Jahangir’s passion for gems was one he shared with, and passed on to, his eldest son, Prince Khurram, the future Emperor Shah Jahan (1592–1666). To his father’s delight, Khurram became one of the greatest connoisseurs of precious stones of his time.

In due course Shah Jahan’s love of beautiful and precious objects outshone even that of his father, as visitors noted. According to Edward Terry, Sir Thomas Roe’s chaplain, Shah Jahan was ‘the greatest and the richest master of precious stones that inhabits the whole earth’. The Portuguese Friar Manrique reported that he was so fascinated by gems that even when there appeared before him after a banquet twelve dancing girls decked out in ‘lascivious and suggestive dress, immodest behaviour and posturing’, the emperor hardly raised his eyes, but instead continued inspecting some fine jewels that had been brought to him by his brother-in-law, Asaf Khan. It has recently emerged that after apparently damaging his eyes through excessive weeping over the death of Mumtaz Mahal, Shah Jahan even commissioned two pairs of bejewelled spectacles, one with lenses of diamonds, the other with lenses of emeralds.

He sealed the pact on 7 July 1656 by presenting to Shah Jahan, within the newly inaugurated Red Fort of Shahjahanabad, what Manucci describes as ‘a large uncut diamond which weighed 360 carats’, and what the Shah Jahan Nama calls ‘an offering of exquisite gems, amongst which was a huge diamond weighing 216 ratis’.23 Tavernier later called this stone ‘that celebrated diamond which generally has been deemed unparalleled in size and beauty’. He says it was presented uncut at 900 ratis, or 787 carats, and added that it had come from the mines of Kollur (today in Karnataka). Centuries later, many Victorian commentators identified this diamond both with Babur’s diamond, which had disappeared into the Deccan a hundred years earlier, and with the Koh-i-Noor, which had by then come to be seen as the greatest of all Indian diamonds. Yet there is no suggestion in any of these texts that Mir Jumla was claiming to return to the Mughals their greatest ancestral diamond which had been lost to them since the time of Humayun – a claim he certainly would have made if this were true, given how much he wished to ingratiate himself with his new patrons. Instead, it sounds as if this huge diamond – which Tavernier explicitly says was presented uncut, and for which our three different sources give widely different but very high weights – was a new discovery, and an unprecedented addition to the Mughal treasury.

Although the Mughals liked their diamonds cut differently from their contemporaries in the West – preferring to keep and celebrate the natural weight and shape of a stone rather than drilling away to produce the smaller but more symmetrically cut gems favoured in Europe

The finished Peacock Throne was finally inaugurated at New Year 1635, on the emperor’s return from his holidays in Kashmir.27 The Jewelled Throne – as it was initially known – was an object of the greatest magnificence, designed to resemble and evoke the fabled throne of Solomon. The Mughals had long surrounded themselves with the aura of the ancient kings – both historical and mythical – of the Middle East and Iran who they had read about in the Quran and in epic poems like the Shahnama. Drawing on these exemplars, the Mughals claimed that their divinely illuminated kingship and their just rule would bring to the world a golden age of prosperity and peace. For Shah Jahan in particular, Solomon, the exemplary Quranic ruler and prophet king, was both a role model and a figure of identification, and he had himself celebrated by his poets as a second Solomon; Mumtaz Mahal, meanwhile, was praised as the new Queen of Sheba.

Shah Jahan’s reign came to a dramatically premature end in 1657, when the emperor suffered a stroke and his son Aurangzeb staged a skilful coup d’état and imprisoned his father in the Red Fort of Agra, in a set of apartments looking out over the Taj. Aurangzeb then headed north from the Deccan with a battle-hardened army, and defeated his rival brother Dara Shukoh at Samugarh, a few miles from Agra. In 1659, he had his brother murdered a few days after capturing him. According to Manucci, he then sent his father a reconciliation present. When the old man opened it, it was found to contain the head of Dara.

Among the stones Tavernier was shown that day was the enormous gem he calls the Great Mughal Diamond and which he says was the huge gem given to Shah Jahan by Mir Jumla: ‘The first piece that Akil Khan (Chief Keeper of the King’s jewels) placed in my hands was the great diamond, which is rose cut, round and very high on one side. On the lower edge there is a slight crack, and a little flaw in it. Its water is fine, and weighs 286 [metric] carats.’ He also mentions that the stone had been badly cut since Mir Jumla gifted it, and that thanks to the incompetence of the man responsible, Hortensio Borgio, the stone had lost much of its original astonishing size. Tavernier also saw two other great diamonds, one of which was a flat, pink stone in a table cut, which he calls the Great Table Diamond, and which from his drawing is clearly the major portion of the Darya-i-Noor, now in Tehran.31 Was the Great Mughal diamond the Koh-i-Noor? In the nineteenth century it was assumed that it must be, but most modern scholars are now convinced that the Great Mughal is actually the Orlov, which with its higher, more rounded dome looks much more like Tavernier’s sketch of the Great Mughal. Moreover, the Orlov and the Great Mughal have the same type of cut, and the same pattern of facets.32 None of the other stones seen by Tavernier look at all like the Koh-i-Noor either. How is it possible that Tavernier failed to see the Koh-i-Noor when the emperor explicitly gave permission for him to see ...

Nader Shah: The Koh-i-Noor Goes to Iran In January 1739, the Mughal Empire was still the wealthiest state in Asia. Almost all of modern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan was ruled from the Peacock Throne – with the Koh-i-Noor still glittering from one of the peacocks on its roof. Although it had been in decline for half a century, and often wracked in internal conflict, the Mughal Empire still ruled most of the rich and fertile lands from Kabul to the Carnatic. Moreover, its decadent and sophisticated capital, Delhi, with two million inhabitants, larger than London and Paris combined, was still the most prosperous and magnificent city between Ottoman Istanbul and Imperial Edo (Tokyo).

As Muhammad Shah’s reign progressed, power ebbed slowly away from Delhi, and the Mughal emperor’s regional satraps increasingly began to take their own decisions on important matters of politics, economics, internal security and self-defence. Two rival regional strongmen in particular established their own discrete spheres of influence, and emerged as virtually autonomous rulers: Sa’adat Khan, the Nawab of Avadh, became the main power broker in the north, with his base at Faizabad in the heart of the Gangetic plains; while to the south, Nizam ul-Mulk established himself as master of the Deccan, based in Aurangabad. The association of both men with the imperial court, and their loyalty to the emperor, was increasingly effected on their own terms and in their own interests. Both men would found dynasties that dominated India for a hundred years. Both were deadly rivals, and their rivalry would soon prove fatal for the Mughal state they professed to serve. In addition to sharing his sovereignty with two overmighty governors, it was Muhammad Shah’s ill fate to have as his immediate western neighbour the aggressive Afshar Turkman Persian-speaking warlord Nader Shah. Nader was the son of a humble shepherd who had risen rapidly in the army thanks to his remarkable military talents. He was as tough, humourless, ruthless and efficient a figure as Muhammad Shah was light-hearted, artistic, chaotic yet refined. The finest pen portrait that survives of Nader was written by an urbane F...

Even before Nader Shah had taken Kandahar, there were rumours in Persia that he was secretly planning to mount a raid on the treasures of Mughal Delhi, ‘to pluck some golden feathers’ from the Mughal peacock. Indeed he was already carefully cultivating two minor grievances as excuses to do so: the Mughals had recently given shelter to several Iranian rebels fleeing his tyranny, while some Mughal customs officials in Sindh had seized the effects of an Iranian ambassador and refused to return them. Nader Shah duly sent envoys to Delhi to complain that the Mughals were not behaving as friends, and to demand a full apology; but he received no redress. Advance warnings by Nasir Khan, the Mughal governor of Kabul, that Nader was clearly planning an invasion were also ignored by Muhammad Shah’s government in Delhi. On 10 May 1738, Nader Shah began his march into northern Afghanistan. On 21 May he crossed the border into the Mughal Empire, heading for the Mughal summer capital of Kabul, one of the empire’s most strategic cities. In this way he began the first invasion of India since Babur’s, two centuries earlier. The great citadel of Kabul, the Bala Hissar, surrendered at the end of June and, with no military resources at his command, there was little the Mughal governor could do to save it. As the Delhi courtier, poet and historian Anand Ram Mukhlis noted, the governor ‘had often written to Muhammad Shah concerning the want of money [to pay his troops], but none of his represent...

The following day was one of the most tragic in the history of the Mughal capital. With over 40,000 of Nader’s soldiers now billeted in the city, many of them in people’s homes, grain prices shot up. When Nader Shah’s soldiers went to negotiate with the grain merchants at Paharganj, near the present-day railway station, the merchants refused to budge and a scuffle broke out. Shortly thereafter a rumour spread that Nader Shah had been killed by a female palace guard. Suddenly the mob began to attack Persian soldiers wherever they found them; by midday, 900 Persians had been killed. Nader Shah responded by ordering a massacre of the civilian population. He left the Red Fort at sunrise the next day to supervise this in person. Dressed in full battle armour, he rode out to the golden mosque of Roshan ud-Daula, half a mile down the Chandni Chowk from the Red Fort, to oversee the retribution from the vantage point of its elevated terrace. The slaughter began promptly at 9 a.m.; the worst killings took place around the Red Fort in the Chandni Chowk, the Dariba and the Jami Masjid, where all the richest shops and the jewellers’ quarters were located. ‘The soldiers commenced killing, moving from house to house, slaughtering and plundering the people’s property, and carrying away their wives and daughters,’ remembered the historian Ghulam Hussain Khan. ‘Many houses were set on fire. In a few days the stench arising from so many unburied bodies, which were filling the houses and stre...

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.’9 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 1778–79, 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.10

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 into 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’.12 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.

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 5000 horse.13 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 hi...

Once again, the foreign physician found himself with a ringside seat to a Punjabi state funeral. Describing the event curtly in his memoirs, Honigberger said: ‘Three of his wives were burnt with him; and I was present at that horrid, yet remarkable spectacle’.21 Eleven slave girls also burned to death that day, but Honigberger, perhaps inured to the horror of sati now, failed even to mention them.

Writing to his wife, Login confessed that Mulraj was nothing like the bloodthirsty rebel she may have read about in the papers, a man who had killed a friend of theirs ‘but rather a weak, chicken-hearted fellow, afraid to do what was right, and entirely in the hands of some resolute villains around him. I don’t think he really intended any harm to dear Pat Vans Agnew’.14 Login was left with no time to dwell on his misgivings since, in addition to his responsibility for the toshakhana, he now had to take charge of Duleep. Arrangements had to be made and a little boy needed to be won over. Login resolved to show his new ward nothing but kindness. He believed a blameless boy was being punished for the actions of others beyond his control. Login was not alone in feeling this way. Sir Henry Lawrence, the Resident of Lahore who had been compelled to ignore Rani Jindan’s pleading letters, was touched by Duleep Singh’s plight. He had been against a land grab from the start, and would have preferred to leave Duleep on the throne, forging a mutually beneficial alliance with the Punjab court. As Lena Login later recalled: ‘the Governor-General’s [Dalhousie’s] decision [to annex the kingdom] was a sore grief to the generous-hearted Resident, and a reversal of many cherished hopes and projects’.15 Most others had no such misgivings. The British press crowed over the annexation and painted the boy king Duleep as the author of his own misfortune: ‘this famous diamond (the largest and mos...

Though the loss of Robert Peel was keenly felt by both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, the royal couple had an ambitious project on the horizon which helped to pull them out from their sadness. ‘The Great Exhibition’, or to give its full title, ‘The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations’, was to be the greatest show on earth, and it was to take place in London, the heart of Victoria’s empire. It had helped that Peel himself had been a champion of the Great Exhibition. He had devoted months of his time and expertise to the event, and had been at a planning meeting on the very day he was fatally thrown from his horse. Victoria and Albert were determined that his efforts should not have been in vain. The Great Exhibition was to be a showcase for the very best examples of culture, industry and beauty. Albert had been instrumental at every stage, coaxing and cajoling his way through British bureaucracy to drag the project from the page to Hyde Park. The couple hoped the exhibition’s success might increase his popularity. When Albert married Queen Victoria in 1839, it had not been a popular match. Victoria’s subjects deemed him to be beneath her, a minor royal from an impoverished and undistinguished state, barely larger than a small English county.2 Parliament also treated him with condescension, reducing his allowance from 50,000 pounds, the usual granted to a sovereign’s spouse, to 30,000 pounds, and vetoing the queen’s wish to give him the title of ‘Prin...

The diamond was finished days after Wellington’s death. The bill for the recutting came to an eye-watering 8000 pounds – the equivalent of more than a million pounds today. Despite all the assurances from Coster and Garrard, the Koh-i-Noor did not retain ‘the majority of its size and value’. Instead, what was left was unrecognizable. The cut had more than halved the Koh-i-Noor’s mass from 190.3 metric carats to 93 metric carats. It now sparkled brilliantly, but could lie meekly in the palm of a hand. News of the reduction left Prince Albert devastated and he braced himself for savage criticism from the press and the public. In the event, however, and perhaps because the diamond had been so poorly received in its original form, Prince Albert got off lightly. All but a few newspapers praised the new and improved Koh-i-Noor. It was flatter and rounder than its original egg shape, cut into what jewellers called an ‘oval stellar brilliant’. Traditionally such diamonds were given thirty-three facets on top in ‘the table’ of the gem and twenty-five facets below, ‘in the pavilion’. However, the Dutch cutters had given the Koh-i-Noor perfect symmetry with thirty-three facets on top and underneath. In the pale light of the English sun, the Koh-i-Noor had at last learned to shine.

Until Duleep Singh personally placed the Koh-i-Noor in her hand, Victoria had been racked with guilt over the gem. The manner in which it had been taken from him, coupled with her genuine fondness for the maharaja, had been enough to prevent her from wearing her most fabulous jewel. Though the handover ceremony in the drawing room at Buckingham Palace was more a performance than an actual granting of permission, the maharaja had, by his actions, set Victoria free. Soon after, she took to wearing the Koh-i-Noor frequently and conspicuously. One of the jewel’s earliest and most spectacular outings took place just over a year after Duleep’s handover. In 1855 Queen Victoria announced plans to travel to France for a state visit. This was momentous news, for not only would this be the first state visit to France by a British sovereign in more than four hundred years, it would also cement a historic alliance between France and Britain in the Crimean War. The French had never had an easy relationship with monarchy. They had gone through a cycle of removing and reinstating their kings with a frequency that alarmed other sovereigns of Europe. In 1792 Louis XVI of the House of Bourbon was not merely dethroned, he was decapitated. A series of bloody purges followed, and as the people took power France’s First Republic was born. The country remained without a monarch until Napoleon Bonaparte morphed from military dictator to emperor in 1804. His reign lasted only eleven years and was e...

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.