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

by William Dalrymple

When they anointed the five-year-old Duleep Singh as Maharaja of Punjab on 18 September 1843, the nobles of the durbar hoped they had found a puppet king to do their bidding. None of them could have guessed that the twenty-six-year-old Jindan, ill-educated, with no aristocratic family behind her, might have other plans. The kennel keeper’s daughter scandalized the court by leaving the purdah of the women’s quarters and declaring that she would govern Punjab herself in her boy’s name.

Lal Singh, who had replaced the slain Jawahar Singh as vizier, disclosed the position of Duleep’s gun batteries to British spies and revealed how many soldiers were in play as well as their battle plans.

Under the Treaty of Lahore, which Duleep Singh was forced to sign on 9 March 1846, the British notionally allowed him to remain on the throne, though they took away all that Duleep’s kingship was built upon.

What at first appeared to be a peaceful surrender ended up as anything but when the crowd which had gathered to watch turned into an angry mob. Whether what followed was pre-planned or merely a reaction to the humiliation felt by the people of Multan is hotly contested. What is not in dispute, however, is that Vans Agnew and Anderson were set upon and eventually hacked to death. This gave the British their casus belli and triggered an endgame which would ultimately lead to the total annexation of Punjab and the loss of the Koh-i-Noor.

Lieutenant Herbert Edwardes, the British political agent in Bannu, was near Multan then, and he sent his Pakhtun irregulars and some Sikh regiments to drive back the rebels. Together, they defeated Mulraj’s army at the battle of Kineyri on 18 June 1848. The British Resident Currie then ordered a small force from the Bengal army to lay siege to the city of Multan, wanting to crush the centre of defiance once and for all. In November, the East India Company’s armies also joined the battle, and eventually Multan fell.

The Second Anglo-Sikh War had lasted almost a year, and the Sikhs were forced to watch what little was left

of their imperial infrastructur...

With the signing of the treaty, Punjab was now unquestionably a British territory; the Koh-i-Noor was British property; Maharaja Duleep Singh was a British problem. Such an outcome would have been unthinkable during the reign of the Lion, Ranjit Singh, and had been brought about largely by the iron will of the new Governor General of India.

To some, he had shown the very best of British spirit, meeting a threat head on and conquering larger dominion for the Company in the process. To others, he was the worst kind of opportunist. He had allowed a local rebellion to grow into a national uprising just so he could annex Punjab and seize its wealth.

Lord Dalhousie, as he himself predicted, was eventually rewarded for his actions and created a marquess for his efforts. Because of him, the Koh-i-Noor was destined for England. India would never see its jewel again. Punjab had lost its king.

The London Evening Standard was just one of the newspapers which ran the story of the Koh-i-Noor’s arrival right next to a detailed account of the attack on the queen. Such juxtapositions in print merely fuelled the rumours about the diamond’s dark powers.

Wellesley went on to distinguish himself further in India, serving as the governor of Mysore and later successfully leading his men in battle against the Marathas of the Deccan Plateau. The Marathas were a proud and martial people and, of all the battles he ever fought, Wellesley would describe his fight against them at the Battle of Assaye as the ‘the bloodiest for the numbers that I ever saw’.

In India, Wellesley earned his spurs. The recognition he got put him in the front line of battle against Napoleon’s army years later. His subsequent success against the French gave him the title of Duke of Wellington. Awareness of his indebtedness to India perhaps added to his fascination with the Koh-i-Noor:

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.

On 8 March 1853, Maharaja Duleep Singh, aged fourteen years and six months, converted to Christianity at a quiet ceremony at his home in Fattegarh. Punjab greeted the news of Duleep’s conversion with grief rather than anger. The feared uprising did not occur. The behemoth truly did not know its own strength.

A troopship filled with Sikh soldiers returning from the Second Opium War happened to be sailing up Calcutta’s Hooghly River. Rumours spread among the crew that their lost maharaja had returned to India and Rani Jindan, his much-wronged mother, was back at his side. In no time at all, hundreds of exhausted and emotional soldiers gathered around the Spence Hotel.

Their bellowing salute to their fallen sovereigns shook the walls: ‘Jo Bole So Nihal, Sat Sri Akal!’ (Whoever says these words will know true joy. Eternal is the Lord God!) After that, the British could not get the pair on a boat fast enough.

Behind the scenes, there was also talk of sending Jindan back to Asia, perhaps even locking her up again. But on 1 August 1863, before the British could put any such plans into action, Rani Jindan died peacefully at her home in London. She was only forty-six. She looked much older.

On 21 October 1893 Duleep Singh died penniless and alone in a shabby Parisian hotel. Since none of his children would ever have heirs of their own, his very name died with him. It is a tragedy still keenly felt in Punjab today.

In 1947 the government of a newly independent India asked for the return of the Koh-i-Noor. Simultaneously, the Congress ministry of Orissa made its own claim, citing the deathbed bequest of Maharaja Ranjit Singh to the Jagannath temple in Puri. Both demands were dealt with curtly. The

He pointed out that the diamond had belonged to some of the luckiest, richest and most powerful monarchs in history and scoffed at the notion that a curse was even possible.

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.

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.