When the British landed on the Indian sub-continent it contained 23.9 per cent of the known world’s wealth. When they left 200 years later in 1947 only 3.2 per cent of known world’s wealth was left. Britain’s rapid growth was clearly based on their undoubted astute minds, their military strength and the wealth of others, primarily ours.

This massive transfer of wealth of the entire sub-continent over two centuries to the British Isles is a story that has always intrigued me, even though my interest has primarily been focused more on the wealth of Lahore and the Punjab.

A lot of research on this aspect of our collective history has been undertaken by Pakistani, Sikh, Indian and even British historians. In this column I would like to focus on one event at the other end - the British end - and see how much and by whom this wealth was transferred.

The pinnacle of British power was the year 1851. Queen Victoria was in power, India was fully conquered and under control, and it was decided to exhibit Britain’s industrial strength and military power to the world. For this the Great London Exhibition of 1851 was held. In this massive exhibition, considered the largest ever held by Britain, there was a special place for the ‘exhibits of the Lahore Darbar’. It is from here that I will begin.

As one entered the Lahore Darbar Section the first thing on display was a massive elephant dummy on which the pure gold seat of Maharajah Ranjit Singh was displayed. The large number of emeralds, rubies and other precious stones were engrained in chains of gold. On the elephant’s head was a massive set of 101 diamonds, some of them, as a London daily newspaper described them, “almost as large as small stones”. The canopy over the two seats had rubies dangling on its sides. A British newspaper said then: “Visitors were stunned when they saw the immense wealth the British had acquired from the Poonjab”.

As one moved on from this section one passed through another with cages made of glass. Inside these glass cages were ‘virtually imprisoned’ samples of living men from various parts of India, with a Punjabi Sikh being the one attracting the most attention, as also a small pygmy from the Andaman Islands, a “slave human flesh eater”. From the inhuman to the artistic one moves in this exhibition. There was an entire section of pure Kashmiri shawls all ‘confiscated’ from Lahore’s Toshakhana. British royalty stood in awe before this massive display of pure Kashmiri shawls.

Then came the section, heavily guarded, of the jewels that were ‘acquired’ from Lahore’s Toshakhana, with the Koh-i-Noor being the most famous. Its weight was 279.6 carats, the largest in the known world. After the exhibition in 1852 this massive diamond was cut down by a famous lapidist W. Sanger who worked on the diamond for 38 days. He worked for the London jeweller Gerard and reduced it to its present 108.93 carats, and can today be seen in the Royal Collection in the Tower of London. It was Misr Mekraj, the Keeper of the Toshakhana, who handed over to Dr. J.S. Login on the 3rd of May, 1849, as also all the treasures of the Lahore Darbar.

But the Koh-e-Noor was just one of 3,734 precious stones handed over, with Darya-e-Noor, Taimur’s Ruby. The Darya-e-Noor alone had 11 pearls with 11 supporting diamonds and 11 garnets (chunnees). The diamond’s weight was 10.9 ‘tolas’. This diamond was acquired by the Nawab of Dacca in an auction and today lies in a safe deposit in Bangladesh. Of this collection 24 were set aside and experts from Lahore’s jewellery market, as well as European experts, declared them as “being priceless”. Of these over 1,250 to be exact were on display and one account describes the scene “as one that left the finest in the land in utter awe”.

The list compiled by Dr Login in May 1849 of Lahore’s Toshakhana is too long for me to write fully in this column, but we do see 103 large bags of pure gold coins and other treasures as among them. In the London 1851 Exhibition was also the throne of Maharajah Ranjit Singh, his huge set of clothes, a lot of them with precious jewels inset, as well as the ‘Kalgee’ of the Sikh guru Gobind Singh. Mind you this ‘kalgee’ was returned to its owner, who happened to be Lord Dalhousie. This brings me to the central theme of this piece, and that being that besides the ‘confiscated treasures’ of the Lahore Darbar from the Toshakhana in the Lahore Fort’s Moti Masjid, a vast treasure was stolen by officials of the Company.

It is often said that the Company handed over almost the entire treasure, then said to be the largest in the world, to the British Crown. This is a misnomer. Let me explain with the assistance of just three examples. At London’s 1851 Great Exhibition, over half of the treasure pieces in the Punjab Section, so the records of the Albert and Victoria Museum tell us today, were from private collection of officials employed in the Punjab.

One such collection was that of Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General of India then, who among other precious stones of treasures, removed the ‘kalgee’ of Guru Gobind Singh. This is a recorded fact even by Dr John Login in a later account.

Next we have the account of John Lawrence who got the Muslim ‘thanedar’ of Lahore to search for missing treasure among the British soldiers posted at the Lahore Fort. The ‘thanedar’ lined up the soldiers and picked out the men he suspected, and took them to a lock-up that existed then at Chuna Mandi. He showed them how the hands of thieves were cut off, and from each and every one treasure was recovered. The extent of pillage can well be imagined from this description. Read R.B. Smith’s book ‘Life of Lord Lawrence’, (printed SE & Co. London 1883) for even greater details of such pillage.

Lastly, as the British took control, almost all of them, save a few honest officials, used the former Lahore Darbar courtiers to pick and choose treasures for themselves, which was ‘certified’ by British officials naturally, as gifts, with some being described as having been ‘purchased’ on the cheap. This has been described in great detail by Dr Rajinder Kaur of Patiala University in her doctoral thesis. It is amazing how all these treasures turned up to be part of the Great London Exhibition of 1851, and which once it was over were returned to their ‘owners’.

Even today, the families of those who had served in Punjab, and British India, own these immense treasures. One estimate put forward recently by the Indian Congress leader Shashi Tharoor at an Oxford University debate was “maybe a few thousand billion UK pounds”. But then “morality remains in the stable of the powerful” … a standard claimed by the ones who are able to rob and get away with it. Sounds familiar even today.

Published in Dawn, July 26th, 2015

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