Green jade, glistening pearls, beryls, garnets, spinels, blood-red rubies, emeralds fine as water, and diamonds flashing fires of rainbows – this is a treasure trove of a book, a book of wonders, the story of the most famous diamond in the world, the Koh-i-Noor which now glitters in the crown of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen-mother.
The origins of the diamond lie in myth and legend; it is reputed to have been stolen from the eye of an idol. William Dalrymple, who writes the book’s first part, The Jewel in the Throne, tells us that there is a possible documented reference to the diamond in an account published in 1561 by a scholarly Portuguese doctor, Garcia da Orta.
Da Orta is only one of a pageant of extraordinary characters who move in and out of these pages. A Sheppardic Jew, he escaped the clutches of the Inquisition the late 1540s to become physician to Sultan Burhan Nizam, Shah of Ahmadnagar. There is the poet-prince Barbur who possessed a diamond of extraordinary size; the boy Jahuar who in 1544 picked up the same diamond dropped by Barbur’s negligent son; the emperor Shah Jahan with his jewelled spectacles; the Jesuits carrying an emperor’s jewels to Goa; the prosaically named Peter Mutton, jeweller to the Mughal Court; the Persian warlord, Nader Shah who defeated the Mughal army and stole the peacock throne which contained the Koh-i-Noor, and Ahmad Khan Abdali whose fate was to have his nose eaten away by maggots.
It is not certain whether Prince Barbur’s fabled diamond was the Koh-i-Noor. The first reliable reference to it is from the late 1740s in its setting of the Mughal Peacock Throne. The Mughal Empire is in decline by the early 18th century and is finished off by Nader Shah who was eventually assassinated. Ahmad Khan Abdali, he off the rotten nose, makes off with the Koh-i-Noor to Afghanistan where the diamond stays for seventy years until Ahmad Khan’s son grandson, Shah Zaman is blinded then murdered, but not before he manages to secrete the diamond into a crack in his cell wall.
The story of the diamond is full of fascinating incident and accident of this kind. Shah Zaman’s successor is his brother Shuja whose emissaries find the Koh-i-Noor being used as a paperweight. Shuja is defeated in battle and Rajit Singh, ally of the powerful East India Company, rises to create a Sikh empire. In 1813 he wrests the diamond from the defeated Shah Shuja, despite the threats of Shuja’s courageous wife to grind the diamond to dust and swallow it.
The East India Company with its eye on the Punjab territory and on the diamond allies itself with Ranjit Singh’s heir, Kharak Singh, who is poisoned. His heir, Nau Nihal Singh, dies in mysterious circumstances, and the last heir is Maharajah Duleep Singh whose tragic story is told in part two of the book: The Jewel in the Crown, the story of the Koh-i-Noor’s passage to England on a ship infected with cholera and nearly wrecked by a fierce storm, and its subsequent possession by the English Crown.
It is a thrilling and learned narrative of a jewel steeped in blood – those who own it or steal it meet some grisly ends: driven mad, decapitated, blinded with hot needles, stuffed with gun powder and blown up, strangled or cut to pieces. It takes the reader from the eye of an idol in a temple in Southern India, to the Mughal Empire, to the tribal lands of Afghanistan, to the Sikh Empire of the Punjab, to a wretched hotel in Paris where the penniless last descendant of Ranjit Singh dies alone, and finally to the Tower of London.
The story ends with some questions to ponder about attitudes to colonialism and whether the spoils of empire should be returned as the Indian Government has requested. And Pakistan lays claim to the diamond, too, as part of Lahore’s heritage. Even the Taliban has claimed it as a possession of Afghanistan.
It is very readable, fast-paced and lively, skilfully weaving the story of the diamond into the history of India and the colonial enterprise.
Jean Briggs taught English for many years in schools in Cheshire, Hong Kong and Lancashire. She now lives in a cottage in Cumbria. The Murder of Patience Brooke, published by The History Press in August 2014, is her first novel, featuring Charles Dickens as a detective. The latest in the series, Murder by Ghostlight, is out now.
