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

by William Dalrymple

Discovered in the deepest mists of antiquity, the great diamond was said to have been looted, probably from the eye of an idol in a temple in southern India, by marauding Turks.

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.

As early as 2000 BCE, tiny Indian diamonds were being used in polishing and cutting tools in ancient Egypt, and diamond crystals were coveted for their use in rings from T’ang China through Hellenistic Afghanistan to Augustan Rome.1 But in their Indian homeland, diamonds were not just valued for their usefulness and beauty, they were believed to be supremely auspicious objects, able to channel planetary influences, and so were given an almost semi-divine status.

According to these two Puranas, the greatest of all gems was the legendary Syamantaka, ‘the prince of gemstones’, sometimes said to be a huge diamond, at other times a ruby, a gem that provoked envy, greed and violence in those who coveted it, exactly as the Koh-i-Noor would do, not in myth, but in reality.

The world’s oldest treatises on gems and gemmology were written in ancient India, some pre-dating even the Puranas. They often show remarkably detailed ‘knowledge of the colour and hiding place of gems’.

Vijayanagara was also the supposed location of the largest diamonds in India, according to the first treatise on the subject written by a European – the remarkable Portuguese doctor and natural philosopher Garcia da Orto (1501–68) who was the author of the third book ever printed in India, Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India, which was published in Goa in 1561.15

He brought with him some of the first cannon and muskets seen in northern India.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On 16 May, after fifty-seven catastrophic days in Delhi, Nader Shah finally left the city, carrying with him the accumulated wealth of eight generations of imperial Mughal conquest. The greatest of all his winnings was the Peacock Throne, in which was still embedded both the Koh-i-Noor and the Timur ruby.16 The loot was loaded on ‘700 elephants, 4,000 camels and 12,000 horses carrying wagons all laden with gold, silver and precious stones’.

The Darya-i-Noor eventually found its way into the Qajar and Pahlavi crown jewels, where it remains, in the state treasury in Tehran.

Delhi – still much the richest city in Asia – recovered from Nader’s visit in a few years. It took half a century for it to recover from Ahmad Shah’s successive sackings.

He had won a crushing victory that definitively ended the dream of the emergence of an independent Maratha empire to replace that of the Mughals, and in the long term created a power vacuum that would leave India at the mercy of the armies of the East India Company.

It was during this period too that Afghanistan accelerated its transformation from the sophisticated centre of learning and the arts, which led some of the Great Mughals to regard it as a far more cultured place than India, to the fractured war-torn backwater it was to become for so much of its modern history.

The diamond was nowhere to be seen, and yet – like the legendary Syamantaka, with which some identified it – it had lost none of its extraordinary ability to create discord all around it.

The British public’s disappointment with the Koh-i-Noor highlighted the difference in the aesthetic cultures of the West and India. Most Indians, including those great jewel connoisseurs, the Mughal emperors, liked their gems as close to their natural state and original size as possible. In contrast, after the development of the brilliant cut in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which released the ‘fire’ at the heart of every diamond, the British wondered why this great diamond failed to sparkle.

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.

For nearly three hundred 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.