A mountain of history – Review of Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand
Diamonds are intrinsically worthless, except for the deep psychological
need they fill – Nicky Oppenheimer, South African diamond magnate

I am fascinated by the history of objects because they often
carry with them a deep history. Something as mundane as a salt cellar from the
Benin kingdom (in present-day Nigeria) displayed in the British Museum isn’t
just some piece of brilliantly carved ivory. Carved on its face is a testament
to the kingdom’s earlier peaceful contact with an European power (i.e., the
Portuguese) and its journey to the museum also embodies the history of the
kingdom’s later hostile contact with another European power (i.e., the British).
Few objects bear as much witness to history as the Koh-i-Noor does and the
authors of this book bring this diamond's tryst with history to life in a vivid way. The history of the Koh-i-Noor
is the history of the Mughal Empire at its height with powerful kings like
Aurangzeb, who cherished the diamond. It is also the history of the decline of Mughal
Empire and the sacking and plundering of its cities by the Persian Shah Jahan,
the subsequent decline of Shah Jahan’s own dynasty and its replacement with the
Afghan Durrani dynasty which came to its definite end with the debacle of the
First Anglo-Afghan war in the 1800s. This same gem found its way from the collapsing
Durrani dynasty to the emerging Sikh empire in the early 1800s before the
current owners (i.e., the British) claimed it after the British East India
Company’s conquest of the Punjab from the Sikh Empire in the 1840s. Through all
these changing fortunes and brutal battles, the Koh-i-Noor remained an object
of great desire and was passed from one conquering empire to the next.
While I got a feel for the eras that span the Koh-i-Noor’s
history, I didn’t get the same feel for the depth of characters in the book as
I did for other books by Mr. Dalrymple. This is certainly an unfair comparison
as this book deals with a history spanning hundreds of years while some of the author's earlier
works which I have thoroughly enjoyed have focused on a relatively short span
of history: the Return of a King dealt
with the events surrounding the First Anglo-Afghan war in the late 1830s /
early 1840s while the Last Mughal was
largely focused on the events leading to the Indian Rebellion of 1857/58 and
its immediate aftermath. This book necessarily glosses over the lives and
characters of many of the key actors in the Koh-i-Noor’s history as to do more than
that would have led to a multi-volume door-stopper of a book rather than the accessible
short read the authors produced. If this book has something close to a flaw, I
think it is the evidence one gets that this is a book written by two authors
with different styles as the hand-off from one section to the other could be
slightly jolting.
Overall, I think this an apt book for the times. In this
climate of increased agitation for “de-globalization” and the erection of walls,
it is important to remember the bonds of a shared past embedded in a gem that
is smack in the center of something as central to British identity as the crown
of its monarchs. The centerpiece of the crown isn’t something from the British
Isles or even Continental Europe, it is a diadem that for many years adorned
the Peacock Throne of Mughal Emperors and was later worn as amulets by Sikh
Maharajas.