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

by William Dalrymple

‘First,’ wrote Theo, ‘according to the tradition of the eldest jewellers in the City of Delhee, as handed down from family to family, this diamond was extracted from the mine Koh-i-Noor, four days journey from Masulipatnam to the north west, on the banks of the Godavari, during the lifetime of Krishna, who is supposed to have lived 5,000 years since…’7

Theo letter

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. Soon, Theo Metcalfe’s report continues, the ‘jewel fell into the hands of the Emperors of the Ghoree dynasty, and from then successively of the Tughluq–Syed and the Lodhi dynasties, and eventually descended to the family of Timur [the Mughals] and remained in their possession until the reign of Mohammud Shah, who wore it in his Turban’.

Trumpeted by the British press and besieged by the British public, the Koh-i-Noor quickly became not only the most famous diamond in the world, but also the single most famous object of loot from India. It was a symbol of Victorian Britain’s imperial domination of the world and its ability, for better or worse, to take from around the globe the most desirable objects and to display them in triumph, much as the Romans once had done with curiosities from their conquests two thousand years earlier.

India's Kohinoor Britain's biggest loot

Only a few historians remembered that the Koh-i-Noor, which weighed 190.3 metric carats when it arrived in Britain, had had at least two comparable sisters, the Darya-i-Noor, or Sea of Light, now in Tehran (today estimated at 175–195 metric carats), and the Great Mughal Diamond, believed by most modern gemmologists to be the Orlov diamond (189.9 metric carats), today part of Catherine the Great’s imperial Russian sceptre in the Kremlin.8 In

all mentions of extraordinary Indian diamonds in sources such as the Memoirs of the Mughal emperor Babur or the Travels of the French jeweller Tavernier have retrospectively come to be assumed to be references to the Koh-i-Noor. At each stage its mythology has grown ever more remarkable, ever more mythic – and ever more shakily fictitious. Yet anyone who tries to establish the facts of the gem’s history will find that unambiguous references to this most celebrated of gems are still, as Theo Metcalfe put it, ‘very meagre and imperfect’ – indeed they are almost suspiciously thin on the ground.

Kohinoor history

according to Marvi’s eyewitness account, the emperor could not have hidden the gem because it was at that point a centrepiece of the most magnificent and expensive piece of furniture ever made: Shah Jahan’s Peacock Throne. The Koh-i-Noor, he writes from personal observation, in the first named reference to

Marvi writes: An octagon, shaped like a European hat, with circular brim, had its sides and canopy gilded and studded with jewels. On top of this was placed a peacock made of emeralds and rubies; onto its head was attached a diamond the size of a hen’s egg, known as the Koh-i-Noor – the Mountain of Light, whose price no-one but God Himself could know! The wings were studded with jewels; many pearls, each the size of a pigeon’s egg, were strung on wire and attached to the pillars supporting the throne.

was adorned with gold and jewels…and the ground was covered with a pearl-edged braid... This throne and its railing were all in pieces, dismantled for transportation, and would be re-assembled in order… The present writer saw this throne when the victorious armies had left Delhi and proceeded to the capital Herat, when it was, by royal command, propped up within Nader’s royal tent, along with two other rare gifts: a diamond known as the Darya-i Noor, the Sea of Light, and a ruby known as the ‘Ain al-Hur, the Eye of the Huri.’10

Until the discovery of diamond mines in Brazil in 1725, with the sole exception of a few black diamond crystals

Most such alluvial diamonds are tiny, natural octahedral crystals.

Diamond's Alluvial

According to the Garuda Purana, which reached its final form in the

A woman may be noble, she may have good features. She may have a nice complexion, be filled with love, be shapely. But without ornaments, my friend, she is not beautiful. The same goes for poetry.10

Woman with jewelry

Early Indian sculpture shows the centrality of jewellery to Indian courtly life. In many ancient Indian courts, jewellery rather than clothing was the principal form of adornment and a visible sign of court hierarchy, with strict rules being laid down to establish which rank of courtier could wear which gem in which setting. Indeed in the earliest book of Indian statecraft, Kautilya’s Arthasastra, written

The centrality of gems to ideas of beauty in pre-modern Indian court life is particularly apparent in the art and records of the Cholas of Thanjavur, who dominated the southern peninsula of India from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries.

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,

Vij

nineteenth century it was assumed that it must be, but most modern scholars are now convinced that the Great Mughal is actually

wisely left to his advisers and regents. The

The Mining Journal, a dry technical publication, gave a more accurate representation of Duleep’s plight than the Governor General: ‘The recent war in Mooltan, and disturbances in the Punjaub, have induced the British resident at Lahore to secure, as a hostage, the person of the boy King Maharajah Dhuleep [sic] Singh, and at the same time to seize the Koh-i-noor.’20

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