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February 1 - February 10, 2021
The maharaja took full advantage of the opportunity presented by the Afghan civil war to absorb almost all of the lands of the Durrani empire between the Indus and the Khyber Pass, conquering Peshawar in 1818, and Kashmir a year later.
in December 1838, there followed a state visit by Lord Auckland. This marked the beginning of the first British invasion of Afghanistan with joint manoeuvres being enacted on the fields of Ferozepur by British and Sikh armies, bookended by a series of ceremonial levees and dinners.
From there Ranjit sent the Koh-i-Noor to entertain the Governor General’s sisters since he was too sick to do so himself:
Many devout Hindus believed that the Koh-i-Noor was in fact the Syamantaka gem, closely associated with Lord Krishna in the legends of the Bhagavad Purana. Lord Krishna was a form of Lord Jagannath, and returning the gem to the deity who had the greatest claim to it restored a certain balance to the universe.
With one such inclination of his head Ranjit Singh was said to have given away the Koh-i-Noor to the Jagannath pandits.
Other than Ranjit Singh himself, Beli Ram was the only man in the kingdom permitted to handle the Koh-i-Noor. Twisting the long pearl-embellished tassels of the diamond’s elaborate mount around his fingers, Beli Ram treated the Koh-i-Noor as if it were a living, dangerous bird of prey. When the maharaja visited the far reaches of his kingdom, Beli Ram took care of the most sensitive arrangements. He would hide the Koh-i-Noor in a plain, unobtrusive casket, and two exact glass replicas in two identical caskets.
Beli Ram hid the Koh-i-Noor in his vaults and refused to send it to Orissa.
With the Koh-i-Noor strapped to his arm, Sher Singh was anointed maharaja of Punjab on 18 January 1841.
By December 1843, the last man standing was no man at all but a tiny doe-eyed child by the name of Duleep Singh. Desperate for a symbol of unity, the entire durbar united behind Ranjit Singh’s youngest son, a five-year-old infant.
With the Koh-i-Noor strapped to his soft little arm, Duleep sat in his mother’s lap while she ruled over one of the most powerful empires in all Asia.
By the 1840s the British were the undisputed geopolitical masters of much of India.
In 1843, the very year that Duleep was anointed, East India Company troops began to build up south of the Sutlej. Detecting tensions, British agents made tentative approaches to Jindan, offering support to her regency. Even as they made overtures to her, they wooed the most powerful men in the royal court, offering to help them topple the regent.
The Sikhs interpreted the unconcealed troop build-up as an act of aggression, and on 11 December 1845 Sikh cavalry crossed south over the Sutlej River to push back against the British encroachment. Two days later, claiming that his territory had been violated, the British Governor General Sir Henry Hardinge declared war.
The battle of Ferozeshah on 21 December 1845 was one of the hardest ever fought by the British army, and their losses were heavy.
First Anglo-Sikh War, the British were aware that they were still vastly outnumbered in the region.
Signing the Treaty of Bhyroval with the child, the British vowed to protect him until he reached the age of sixteen, as long as he in turn submitted to the presence of a Resident who would have full authority to direct matters in all departments of the state.
One of Currie’s first acts was to raise taxes to refill depleted British coffers.
The gem called the Koh-i-noor, which was taken from Shah Sooja-ool-mulk by Maharajah Runjeet Singh, shall be surrendered by the Maharajah of Lahore to the Queen of England.
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.
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 Koh-i-noor had been fatal to so many of his family that he had hardly hoped ever to survive the charge of it!’12
When Dalhousie made it clear that every last coin and trinket was to be sent back to England, and not a penny of gain spent on the natives, Login felt decidedly uneasy.
Queen Victoria accepted Dalhousie’s explanation; however, she also made it known that she wanted regular updates on the maharaja’s welfare and progress, urging her representatives to treat him with kindness. Duleep was almost the same age as Victoria’s eldest son, Bertie, the Prince of Wales, and she was deeply touched by his plight.
on 19 April 1849, Rani Jindan escaped from Chunnar Fort.
Dalhousie was stung by the criticism, and had to bear further insult when the East India Company insisted on leaving him out of any Koh-i-Noor handover ceremony.
Reaching home ‘with his heart in his mouth’, John Lawrence sent for his old bearer and said to him, ‘Have you got a small box which was in my waistcoat pocket sometime ago?’ ‘Yes, Sahib,’ the man replied. ‘I found it and put it in one of your boxes.’ ‘Bring it here,’ said the sahib. Upon this, the old servant went to a battered tin container and produced the little box from it. ‘Open it,’ said John Lawrence, ‘and see what is inside.’19 John watched as the baffled bearer held up the Koh-i-Noor. ‘There is nothing here Sahib,’ he said, ‘but a bit of glass!’20 John Lawrence dined out on that
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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.
As for tradition, when Shah Shoojah, from whom it was taken, was afterwards asked, by Runjeet’s desire, ‘what was the value of the Koh-i-noor’ he replied, ‘Its value is Good Fortune; for whoever possesses it has been superior to all his enemies.’28
The Koh-i-noor is not cut in the best form for exhibiting its purity and lustre, and will therefore disappoint many, if not all, of those who so anxiously press forward to see it.6
Dutch craftsmen working for Mozes Coster, Holland’s largest and most famous diamond merchant, studied the scientific data and confirmed Brewster’s opinion about its flaws. Unlike the scientist, however, they were sure they could cut the Koh-i-Noor. Not only would they make it glitter, they assured the prince, they would also preserve the diamond’s majestic size. The royal couple ordered work on the Koh-i-Noor to begin.
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.
Until Duleep Singh personally placed the Koh-i-Noor in her hand, Victoria had been racked with guilt over the gem. The manner in which it had been taken from him, coupled with her genuine fondness for the maharaja, had been enough to prevent her from wearing her most fabulous jewel.
The crown had been crafted a full twelve months before the maharaja had made the token gesture of personally handing over the diamond to Queen Victoria, implying that she was determined to keep and wear the Koh-i-Noor despite her guilt over the manner in which the gem had been taken and no matter what the response of Duleep might have been.
On 21 October 1893 Duleep Singh died penniless and alone in a shabby Parisian hotel.
when Queen Victoria died in 1901, the Koh-i-Noor was worn not by her son, the new Emperor of India, King Edward VII, but by her daughter-in-law, Queen Alexandra. Somehow a belief had taken root that women could wear it with impunity but that it would destroy any man who dared.
Queen Elizabeth II is taking no chances. She has refrained from wearing the jewel. It now sits on display at the Jewel House in the Tower of London, but retirement for the Koh-i-Noor has not been altogether peaceful.
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 British government stated that the diamond had been formally presented to the then sovereign, Queen Victoria, by its rightful owner, the Maharaja of Lahore. To draw a line under the matter, the government added that this situation was ‘non-negotiable’.
During the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, when the Koh-i-Noor made its appearance in her mother’s crown, India put forward another request, perhaps hoping the new sovereign would be more amenable. That too was turned down flatly.
In August that year, on the eve of Pakistan’s Independence Day celebrations, as temperatures in London climbed to their highest levels yet, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the ninth prime minister of Pakistan, wrote to James Callaghan, the British prime minister, and demanded the return of the Koh-i-Noor.
In 1990 Kuldip Nayar, then high commissioner for India in London, raised the question of the Koh-i-Noor’s return.
After Bhutto and Nayar, neither the Indian nor the Pakistani government seemed keen to jeopardize relations with Great Britain over the Koh-i- Noor. All other attempts to repatriate the diamond have been instigated by members of the public, often to the embarrassment and irritation of those who sit in Delhi and Islamabad.
In November 2000, the Taliban demanded that Queen Elizabeth hand the Koh-i-Noor to them ‘as soon as possible’. Presumably, they wished to display it in the bombed-out museum in Kabul.
In 2010, David Cameron, the then British prime minister, made an official visit to Punjab. He was confronted by the Indian media which suggested that Britain could, by giving back the diamond, begin to atone for its exploitation of India during the Raj.
2015 being a particularly active year. In July, a group calling itself the ‘Mountain of Light’ announced their intention to sue the British Crown for the return of the diamond. The consortium, made up of businessmen and Bollywood actors, said they would make their claim under the Common Law doctrine of ‘trespass to goods’, arguing that the British government had stolen the diamond. If need be, they would take their claim to the International Court of Justice. Actress Bhumika Singh, part of the consortium, said, ‘The Koh-i-Noor is not just a 105-carat stone7 but part of our history and culture
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Narendra Modi was determined to get it back. In September 2016, the government submitted an affidavit to the court. It stated that it did not believe it had legal grounds to pursue a return but it might resort to diplomatic relations to seek its retrieval from Britain.
It stressed that according to the Antiquities and Art Treasures Act, 1972, the country of origin of an antique could not invoke its right of retrieval if the article had left the country before the law came into force.
many owners of the Koh-i-Noor – Shah Shuja among them – have indeed suffered in the most appalling ways. Its owners have variously been blinded, slow-poisoned, tortured to death, burned in oil, threatened with drowning, crowned in molten lead, assassinated by their own family and bodyguards, lost their kingdoms and died in penury. Even inanimate objects associated with the gem seem to have been struck down – witness the cholera epidemic and storms which nearly sank the Medea as it brought the Koh-i-Noor to England, scything through passengers and crew.
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.
what is the proper response to imperial looting? Do we simply shrug it off as part of the rough-and-tumble of history or should we attempt to right the wrongs of the past?
