NON-FICTION: BLOOD DIAMOND
The world’s most infamous little diamond — only the 90th largest in the world — glimmers along a bloody trail from throne to armband, (briefly) a humble paperweight, from brooch to crown, smuggled and secreted, carelessly misplaced or locked away, looted, gifted, exhibited, mocked, cut and, even today, sought by several claimants. William Dalrymple and Anita Anand trace the Kohinoor diamond’s journey over the centuries in an “entirely new history” that attempts to rescue the diamond from “the fog of mythology” that has surrounded it — fog that is attributed to Theo Metcalfe whose narrative, albeit unsubstantiated, has been this diamond’s accepted history for 170 years.
Kohinoor: The Story of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond is symmetrically divided into two parts. The first half is written by Dalrymple, who takes us beyond time to the Syamantaka jewel of Hindu mythology (implying that this may or may not be the origins of the Kohinoor). The mists of time obscure any “clear and unambiguous” mention of the Kohinoor until after Nadir Shah’s invasion of India during the reign of Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah ‘Rangila’ in the mid-1700s. By this time the Kohinoor, which had been just one of myriad jewels adorning the famous Peacock Throne in Delhi, had already left for Khorasan as part of Nadir Shah’s considerable loot, “loaded on 700 elephants, 4,000 camels and 12,000 horses [pulling] wagons all laden with gold, silver and precious stones.”
From Nadir Shah to the Afghan general Ahmad Shah Durrani, the diamond seems to have had a comparatively simple transfer — at least by one newly translated account (other accounts mentioned in the book’s endnotes state otherwise) — but Dalrymple does not spare us any graphic details of the next particularly gruesome leg of the Kohinoor’s journey as the diamond passed on to Ahmad Shah’s son and eventually his grandson, Shah Shuja. Worn as an armlet with its sister-stone, the Timur ruby (actually a red spinel), the Kohinoor already symbolised significant power; this symbolism was taken to its zenith when it was painstakingly and determinedly acquired by Maharaja Ranjit Singh as “the seal on his status as the successor to the fallen dynasty.” Treasuring it his entire life and wearing it peerlessly and proudly, Ranjit Singh died presumably failing to indicate what the Kohinoor’s fate was to be. Or perhaps he had indicated quite clearly, but various contenders to his throne chose not to interpret the instruction quite so sagaciously. Either way, Dalrymple’s half of the book ends at this murky point in time.
Greed, conquest, murder and torture — the ugly history behind a fabled jewel
Anand takes up the diamond’s story from Ranjit Singh’s elaborate cremation ceremony in 1839. In the four years that followed, “Punjab lost three maharajas, one maharani and numerous aristocrats”, leaving five-year-old Duleep Singh as heir to the throne and owner of the jewel.