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

by William Dalrymple

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.