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

by William Dalrymple

The Mughals, perhaps more than any other Islamic dynasty, made their love of the arts and their aesthetic principles a central part of their identity as rulers. They consciously used jewellery and jewelled objects as they used their architecture, art, poetry, historiography and the dazzling brilliance of their court ceremonial – to make visible and manifest their imperial ideal,

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.

Mir Jumla was a Persian immigrant to the Deccan, who set himself up as a merchant and gem dealer. According to the Venetian traveller Niccolao Manucci, ‘Mir Jumla initially went through the streets from door to door selling shoes; but fortune resolved to favour him, and little by little he rose to be a great merchant of much fame in the kingdom.

But whatever the situation in his bedroom, Muhammad Shah ‘Rangila’ was certainly no warrior on the battlefield. He survived in power by the simple ruse of giving up any pretence of ruling: in the morning he watched partridge and elephant fights; in the afternoon he was entertained by jugglers, mime artists and conjurors. Politics he wisely left to his advisers and regents.

The dwindling of the power of the emperor was a process that had been going on for some time, as the empire began to decline after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707.

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.

Less than three months later, at Karnal, 75 miles north of Delhi, he defeated three merged Mughal armies – one from Delhi, a second from Avadh and a third from the Deccan – in all, around one million men, with a force of only 1,50,000 musketeers.

A week later, as supplies began to run out in the encircled Mughal camp, Nader invited Muhammad Shah to pay a visit under flag of truce. The emperor accepted, and foolishly crossed the battle lines with only a handful of attendants and bodyguards. Invited for negotiations, and magnificently entertained, Muhammad Shah Rangila then found that Nader simply refused to let him leave. His bodyguards were disarmed, and Nader placed his own troops to stand guard over the Great Mughal.

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.

It was on this occasion, according to Theo Metcalfe, that Nader Shah discovered from the great courtesan Nur Bai that Muhammad Shah had hidden the Koh-i-Noor in his turban, and Nader won it by offering to swap turbans, ‘as brother rulers’, and as a lasting memento of their friendship. It was then, according to Theo, that the great diamond gained its name – the Koh-i-Noor or Mountain of Light – as Nader held the stone in his hand, awestruck.

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

Noor and the Timur ruby.

The loot was loaded on ‘700 elephants, 4,000 camels and 12,000 horses carrying wagons all laden with gold...

After this, the heartbroken and increasingly paranoid monarch descended slowly into madness.19 Wherever he went, men were tortured and mutilated. The innocent were punished as cruelly as the guilty. Mass executions and grisly towers of severed skulls began to mark the passage of his army.

‘the Peacock Throne and the tent of pearls fell into our hands, and were torn in pieces and divided on the spot, although our chiefs themselves little knew their value; many of us threw away the pearls as useless, and our soldiers, ignorant of the value of gold, offered their yellow money in exchange for a lesser quantity of silver or copper’.

Then in a ghoulish coronation ceremony, reminiscent of an episode of Game of Thrones, Agha Mohammad personally poured a jug of molten lead into the crown.

When he captured the southern Persian capital of Kerman which had revolted against him, he ordered that the women and children should be given over to his soldiers as slaves, and that any surviving men be killed. To make sure no one skimped on his orders, he commanded that the men’s eyeballs be brought to him in baskets, and poured on the floor. He stopped counting only at 20,000.

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

The Koh-i-Noor and its sister, the Timur Ruby, were both kept by Ahmad Khan Abdali on his person. He wore them both in an armlet in Kandahar when he took the throne to create what became in time a new country, and the home of the Koh-i-Noor for the next seventy years – Afghanistan.

Ahmad Khan seized the bullion, and immediately put it to use to buy allies and influence. Within a few months, at a grand jirga, or gathering of the clans, held at the shrine of Sher Surkh near Kandahar in July 1747, the twenty-four-year-old Ahmad Khan was elected paramount chief, not just of his own Abdali clan, but of all the Afghan tribes. A celebrated Sufi darwish then placed some barley sheaves in Ahmad Shah’s turban, crowning him Padshah, Durr-i-Durran – Emperor, and Pearl of Pearls.1 From this point on, Ahmad Khan Abdali became known as Ahmad Shah Durrani.

Ahmad Shah’s first conquests were Kabul and Herat. He then turned southward, determined, like his hero Nader Shah, to fill his treasury with the plundered wealth of Hindustan. He seized Lahore, Multan and western Punjab, destroying the most sacred temples of the Sikhs at Amritsar

and fixing the southern boundary of his empire at Sindh and at the great shrine of Sirhind in Punjab. He ...

After eight successive raids deeper and deeper into the plains of north India, Ahmad Shah finally crushed the massed cavalry of the Maratha Confederacy at the battle of Panipat on 14 January 1761, leaving tens of thousands dead on the field of battle. It was his greatest victory: Ahmad Shah along with his Mughal allies, in all an army 60,000-strong, defeated 45,000 Marathas along a 12-kilometre-long front.

By evening around 28,000 Marathas lay dead, among them their general Sadashiva Rao, and the Peshwa’s son.

The next day Ahmad Shah made a triumphant visit to the Sufi shrine of Sirhind with the Koh-i-Noor flashing on his arm.4 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.

At its peak his Durrani empire extended far beyond the boundaries of the modern Afghan state, stretching from Nishapur in Iran to Sirhind, and encompassing Afghanistan, Kashmir, Punjab and Sindh. After the Ottomans, it was the greate...

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.

In 1791, a conspiracy against Timur’s life was hatched in Peshawar and nearly succeeded. The welter of killings which Timur embarked on to destroy the conspirators, and the cold-blooded way he violated an oath to capture one of the ringleaders, cast a cloud over his final years. He died two years later in the spring of 1793, on his way from Peshawar to Kabul, probably from poison: as the historian Mirza ‘Ata Mohammad put it, ‘The wine server of fate served him the fatal cup.’

Timur left thirty-six children, twenty-four of whom were sons, but he failed to nominate an heir.

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.

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 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 his fracturing empire, it was Ranjit Singh who would slowly prise the lucrative eastern provinces of the Durrani empire from his former overlord and take his place as the dominant power, eventually ruling no...

the architects and tile makers for which Khurasan was famous under the Timurids, continued their migration southeastwards to Lahore, Multan and the cities of Hindustan, and westwards to Persia.

‘The Afghans of Khurasan have an age-old reputation,’ wrote Mirza ‘Ata Mohammad, one of the most perceptive writers of the age, ‘that wherever the lamp of power burns brightly, there like moths they swarm; and wherever the tablecloth of plenty is spread, there like flies they gather.’ The reverse was also true.

It was during his reign that the Koh-i-Noor first began to achieve real fame and gained the singular status it has retained ever since: up to this point, as a possession of Nader Shah and his Durrani successors, it had always been worn as part of a pair along with the gem known to the Mughals as the great ruby of Timur, to Nader Shah as the Eye of the Houri and to the Durranis as the Fakhraj.

At the same time he built a remarkably rich, strong, centralized and tightly governed Sikh state in its place, treating defeated chiefs with great generosity, and absorbing them into his political system.

‘Ranjit Singh is an old fox,’ he wrote, ‘compared with whom the wiliest of our diplomats is a mere innocent.

These unanswered questions helped sow the seeds of dissension that would soon rend the entire Sikh empire, and propel it into full-scale civil war. 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 royal histographer, Sohan Lal Suri, whose job it was to record events in Ranjit Singh’s court, would later report that the ranis had been filled with unfettered joy as they dressed for their funeral ‘dancing and laughing like intoxicated elephants’.

Though he knew he might be accused of stealing the gem and insulting his master, Beli Ram’s strong belief in the ancient principal of Chakravartin17 gave him the strength to resist men, priests and even their gods.

Dating back to the Mauryan Empire

(322–185 BCE), Chakravartin encapsulated a code of kingship which obliged monarchs to rule benevolently. Centuries before Machiavelli was handing out his own brand of cunning to Italian princes, the Indian emperor Chandragupta Maurya was setting out his own Chakravar...

Though only eighteen years of age, he seemed to possess a maturity beyond his years, and to those who had longed for leadership Nau Nihal seemed worthy to wear the Koh-i-Noor.

When news of the ‘freak accident’ finally got out three days later, Gardner fanned speculation by reporting that of the five artillery men who carried Nau Nihal to his bed, two died in mysterious circumstances, two asked for leave and never came back and one simply and inexplicably disappeared.

As Punjab prepared itself for yet another royal funeral – the third in two years – thoughts turned to the Koh-i-Noor. Was the curse picking off Ranjit Singh’s heirs one by one?

True or not, Ranjit Singh refused to acknowledge the boys as his legitimate heirs. However, he chose not to disown them either; though they would live as princes of Punjab, Ranjit Singh’s failure to acknowledge them publicly meant that neither Sher Singh nor his brother would ever be king. They were condemned by their father’s silence to grow up rich and powerful but ultimately shamed.