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February 1 - February 10, 2021
Duleep Singh was induced to hand over to Queen Victoria the single most valuable object not just in Punjab but arguably in the entire subcontinent: the celebrated Koh-i-Noor, or Mountain of Light.
the gem had been stolen away from Delhi during a Persian invasion a full 110 years earlier,
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
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.
‘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’. Then, when the Mughal Empire crumbled under the invasion of the Persian warlord Nader Shah, ‘the Emperor and he exchanged Turbans, and thus it became the property of the latter’.
From there it spent nearly one hundred years in Afghan hands, before Ranjit Singh extracted it from a fleeing Afghan Shah in 1813.
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
pious Hindus were beginning to wonder if the Koh-i-Noor was actually the legendary Syamantaka gem mentioned in the Bhagavad Purana’s tales of Krishna.
The final act in the Koh-i-Noor’s rise to worldwide fame took place in the aftermath of the Great Exhibition and the press coverage it had engendered.
Today, tourists who see it in the Tower of London are often surprised by its small size, especially when compared to the two much larger Cullinan diamonds kept in the same showcase: at present it is in fact only the ninetieth biggest diamond in the world.9
on 16 April 2016, the Indian Solicitor General, Ranjit Kumar, told the Indian Supreme Court that the Koh-i-Noor was given freely to the British in the mid nineteenth century by Maharaja Ranjit Singh, and had been ‘neither stolen nor forcibly taken by British rulers’. This was by any standards a strikingly unhistorical statement,
centrepiece of the most magnificent and expensive piece of furniture ever made: Shah Jahan’s Peacock Throne.
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.
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.
In the Bhagavad Purana, the Syamantaka jewel came down to earth when Satrajit, the Yadava king of Dwarka, and an ardent devotee of Surya, finally encountered his patron deity while walking along the seashore near the city. Unable to look directly at the god because of the brilliant glare of his radiance, King Satrajit asked him to appear in a less blinding form, explaining that he wished to perceive him with greater clarity. Surya then took the Syamantaka off his neck, and Satrajit knelt down and adored his God,
This mythological trail of greed, theft and bloodshed so closely mirrored the actual murderous history of the Koh-i-Noor that, by the nineteenth century, many pious Hindus began to equate the diamond with the Syamantaka and the legends of Krishna.
The Canarese say that just as a virgin is more valuable than a woman who is not one, so this naife diamond is worth more than a cut one.
Babur not only established the Mughal dynasty, which ruled northern India for 330 years, he also wrote one of the most fascinating diaries ever written by a great ruler: the Baburnama
Here he also makes reference to an extraordinary diamond that was among the wonderful richness of gems he captured during his conquests.
Its reputation is that every appraiser has estimated its value at two and half days food for the whole world.
Both in his rule and during his exile Humayun demonstrated the same dreamy and somewhat unreliable nature.
Humayun managed to leave all his gems by a riverbank when he went to do his ablutions. They were only recovered when a boy rode after him and gave them back to him.
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.
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.
To his subjects Shah Jahan presented himself not just as the ruler, he wanted to be thought of as a centre of Divine Light, a Sun King, in fact almost a Sun God.
In 1628, at the height of his power, Shah Jahan brought the Mughal love affair with precious stones to its climax when he commissioned the most spectacular jewelled object ever made: the Peacock Throne.
The Dutch East India Company representative in Delhi reported the massive force gathering six miles outside the city, a sea of people ‘two miles wide by 15 miles long. If this army were trained after the European model,’ he noted, ‘it could conquer the whole world. However, there is no order; each commander does as he pleases.’ After
the accumulated wealth of 348 years changed masters in a moment.’
on 6 April 1739, Nader, the son of a humble shepherd, married his son Nasrullah to a great-great-granddaughter of Emperor Shah Jahan.
on 12 May, Nader held a durbar and placed the crown of Hindustan back on the head of Muhammad Shah, effectively reinstating him as emperor, albeit shorn of his northern provinces to the west of the Indus, which Nader annexed, and one ruling now through the grace of the Persian conqueror.
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 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’.
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.20
What happened to the Koh-i-Noor at this point has long been a mystery.
One of Nader Shah’s harem attendants immediately informed [his most senior Afghan general] Ahmad Khan Abdali. With 3,000 Afghan troopers from the Abdali battalion and other troopers from the Uzbek battalion, Ahmad Khan stood guard until morning over the royal harem. At dawn, he clashed with a group of Qizilbash renegades and evil Afshar who were plundering the royal coffers, routed them, and took charge of all the money and valuables. As a reward for this service, the first lady of Nader Shah’s harem gave Ahmad Khan the Koh-i-Noor diamond, one of two diamonds – the other being the Darya-i-Noor
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The Darya-i-Noor eventually found its way into the Qajar and Pahlavi crown jewels, where it remains, in the state treasury in Tehran.
Meanwhile, the Great Mughal diamond found its way into the open market in Turkestan, where it was eventually purchased by an Armenian trader who shipped it to the emerging world centre of the diamond market in Amsterdam. Here it was purchased by Count Orlov, a dashing Russian aristocrat and lover of Catherine the Great. On his return to St Petersburg, however, he discovered that he had been supplanted in Catherine’s bed by his rival Potemkin, and that in his absence his family had lost their position at court. He presented the gem to Catherine on her name day, full of hope – but while the
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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 made a triumphant visit to the Sufi shrine of Sirhind with the Koh-i-Noor flashing on his arm.4
After the Ottomans, it was the greatest Muslim empire of the second half of the eighteenth century. Yet though India was at his mercy, he never tried to rule in the place of the Mughals, and his gaze remained fixed on the mountains of the Hindu Kush.
From early on in his reign, his face began to be eaten away by what the Afghan sources call a ‘gangrenous ulcer’, possibly leprosy or some form of tumour. Even as he was winning his greatest victory at Panipat, Ahmad Shah’s disease had already consumed his nose, and a diamond-studded substitute was attached in its place.
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.
As the Sikhs consolidated their power, and as Durrani Afghanistan retreated into tribal civil war, eight hundred years of history – beginning with the invasions of Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) – drew to a close: since 1799 no Afghan has succeeded in invading the Punjab plains or raiding the rich plains of Hindustan beyond.
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.
Before he was blinded, however, Shah Zaman succeeded in hiding his most precious gems. Some he dug deep into the prison floor with the point of his dagger. The Fakhraj ruby he had already hidden under a rock in a stream below the Shinwari fort; now he slipped the Koh-i-Noor into a crack in the wall of his cell.
‘Shah Shuja immediately dispatched a few of his most trustworthy men to find these two gems and advised them that they should leave no stone unturned in their efforts. They found the Koh-i-Noor with a mullah who in his ignorance was using it as a paperweight for his official papers. As for the Fakhraj ruby, they it found with a Talib, a student, who had uncovered it when he went to a stream to swim and wash his clothes. They impounded both gems and brought them back in the king’s service.’
Shah Shuja met Ranjit briefly in 1810: the maharaja presented the appropriate gifts and, in return, Shuja gave him several precious gemstones from his store. But Shuja was suspicious of Ranjit Singh’s offers, and moved north without taking up his offer. He did, however, leave his wife, Wa’fa Begum, in Ranjit Singh’s hands, and secretly entrusted the Koh-i-Noor to her while he tried to find troops to regain his throne.
Ranjit Singh coveted the Koh-i-Noor diamond beyond anything else in this world, and broke all the laws of hospitality in order to get possession of it.
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. Now the Koh-i-Noor was worn alone, quickly becoming a symbol of all Ranjit Singh had strived for and the independence he had fought so hard to achieve.
‘Good luck for he who has possessed it, has obtained it by overpowering his enemies.’
