Koh-i-Noor

by William Dalrymple

  The difficulty of access restored some of the lost mystery to the diamond. Also, in an attempt to reinstate the Koh-i-Noor’s tarnished reputation, newspapers polished archive copy, reminding readers of the gem’s exotic provenance and potent symbolism. The display and the diamond’s mount became a metaphor for British supremacy:

  The two golden hands that slightly clasp its extreme points, and present it in gorgeous relief against the deep purple velvet background, are indicative of the graceful and delicate fingers which now hold it, while the massive and impenetrable safe by which it is surrounded illustrates the moral material power which defies the assaults of all enemies and secures it more efficiently than the triple ramparts of Lahore.11

  The security provided for the Koh-i-Noor was substantial, and carried the name of Chubb.

  From the moment he had patented his first ‘detector lock’ in 1817, Jeremiah Chubb gained a reputation for making unbreakable locks. His fame was such that his creations even figured in the stories of Sherlock Holmes as locks that could not be picked. So confident was Chubb of his workmanship that he offered £100 from his own pocket and a pardon from the government to one particular convict, a locksmith by trade, who had successfully cracked every lock he had ever been presented with. Though he toiled on Chubb’s detector for three months, the convict could not pick it. Chubb’s Koh-i-Noor safe was regarded as his best work to date: ‘One of the peculiarities of Mr Chubb’s wonderful safe is said to be that the moment the surrounding glass shade is touched, the diamond, like a sensitive plant, shrinks from the too near approach of a profane hand, and descends into its adamantine fastness.’12 In reality, the diamond would not so much withdraw like a sensitive plant, but instead plop through a small trap door into a thick walled safe if anyone attempted to reach for it.

  Although the celebrated changes drew fresh crowds, enthusiasm quickly evaporated, thanks to the unbearable temperatures inside the cabin. Gas lamps, mirrors and heavy fabric turned the display into a sauna, causing visitors to swoon after only a few minutes. The press began to blame the Koh-i-Noor for being difficult, as if it were some kind of contrary and disappointing child:

  There appears to be something impracticable about the gem, for the more it is lighted up, the less it is disposed to display its splendour. Those on Saturday, who were tempted to change the comparative coolness of the nave, with a temperature of 83 or 84, for the stifling heat of the diamond cavern, came away by no means satisfied with its appearance …13

  In October, the Great Exhibition ended, and the Koh-i-Noor was finally liberated from its iron cage and the withering estimation of the public, ‘after having excited the wonder and the sneers of so many hundred thousand visitors, and to the great relief of the policeman who has been on duty beside the cage since 1st of May’.14

  Spared any further public humiliation, the diamond was taken back to the vaults.

  10

  The First Cut

  In Calcutta, Dalhousie had been following the Koh-i-Noor’s debut with a mixture of disappointment and irritation. He had always described the gem in superlatives, and now stood accused of exaggeration as well as arrogance. He joined the choir of criticism, reproaching the diamond itself for its failed public debut: ‘[It] is badly cut: it is rose- not brilliant-cut, and of course won’t sparkle like the latter.’ Though Dalhousie did not dare name him directly, he also seemed to blame Prince Albert for the diamond’s humiliation: ‘it should not have been shown in a huge space. In the Toshakhana at Lahore Dr Login used to show it on a table covered with black velvet cloth, the diamond alone, appearing through a hole in the cloth, and relieved by the dark colour all around.’1

  Albert too became preoccupied with the diamond’s failure, and decided to do something about it. Summoning scientists and jewellers, he demanded to know what could be done to improve its appearance. The eminent physicist Sir David Brewster was one of the most noteworthy men to be consulted on the matter. Known as the ‘Father of modern experimental optics’, Brewster had invented the kaleidoscope and had pushed at the boundaries of mineral analysis and the physics of light polarisation. After studying the Koh-i-Noor closely, Brewster came up with a damning verdict. The diamond was flawed at its very heart. Yellow flecks ran through a plane at its centre, one of which was large and marred its ability to refract light. If it had to be cut, the risk of destroying it in the process was high. At the very least, the diamond would lose a great deal of its mass if the flaws were to be dealt with adequately.

  This was not the answer Prince Albert had wanted to hear, so he sent his expert’s analysis to Messrs Garrard of London, jewellers to the queen, hoping for a more encouraging assessment. The Garrard family summoned the finest diamond-cutters in the world to give their opinion. Dutch craftsmen working for Mozes Coster, Holland’s largest and most famous firm of diamond merchants, 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.

  A specially designed workshop was constructed at 25 Haymarket, in London’s Piccadilly. Garrard hired Coster’s two best diamond-cutters, Levie Benjamin Voorzanger and J.A. Feder, who travelled from Amsterdam to England.2 The men were provided with a steam engine, designed by Maudslay Sons and Field, a firm of respected British marine engineers.3 The engine powered fast-spinning grinders, vital precision-cutting tools used by the Dutch team. As engineers prepared for the cutting, clanking about the workshop under the supervision of the queen’s mineralogist, James Tennant, the Koh-i-Noor and its failings made their way into the headlines again: ‘The precious stone, which was the cynosure of the world’s exhibition of 1851, attracted from the multitudes who last year gazed upon it, disappointment at the somewhat dim radiance of its lustre … not fulfilling the expectations entertained from the highflown descriptions which have given the Mountain of Light a title which many beholders held to be a misnomer.’4

  Though there was little to see outside the heavily guarded Haymarket workshop, a steady trickle of onlookers started to arrive by the first week of July. Content merely to listen to the banging and whirring going on inside, they waited, like a crowd of concerned relatives outside an operating theatre. Finally, after weeks of anticipation, on 16 July 1852, the ‘patient’ was brought forth from the Tower of London and presented to the Dutch craftsmen. Though the sight of the Koh-i-Noor’s full military escort was impressive enough, spectators refused to leave even after the diamond had disappeared behind the heavily guarded gates. Rumours, fanned by the British press, had taken hold of the crowd. If they waited long enough, they were sure to be rewarded.

  According to reports, no less than the ‘Iron Duke’, Wellington himself, hero of Waterloo and scourge of Napoleon, would inaugurate the cutting process. Some reports even suggested that his own battle-calloused hands would cut the Koh-i-Noor. The chance of seeing two legends meet, one diamond and one iron, was irresistible. The crowd stayed stubbornly where it was. It did not have long to wait. On 17 July, the eighty-three-year-old Wellington arrived on horseback to loud cheers. Adulation always caused the duke to feel uncomfortable, and he made his way stiffly through the guarded doors of the workshop with barely a nod to his admirers.

  Thanks to his distinctive profile, the duke was affectionately referred to as ‘Old Nosey’, and people sang songs about his exploits in public houses up and down the realm. Small boys, rich and poor, played out his 1815 victory at Waterloo with tin soldiers. Though thirty-seven years had passed since he had vanquished Napoleon, that victory remained vivid to patriotic Britons. Most would have been baffled by the great warrior’s interest in a piece of jewellery.

  To Wellington, however, the Koh-i-Noor was so much more. The diamond was India, and India had been the making of him. In 1769, eleven years before the birth of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the Duke of Well
ington had been plain old Arthur Wellesley, born into an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family. Unlike his elder brother Richard, Arthur showed little promise as an Eton schoolboy, causing his mother to worry constantly about her awkward son.

  When he turned sixteen, his father died, leaving the family in a financially precarious situation. Wellesley was encouraged by his mother to join the army and make his own fortune. After a stuttering start, at the age of twenty-four Wellesley joined the 33rd Regiment of Foot. In May 1796, Wellesley’s 33rd Regiment arrived in Calcutta. The British had been embroiled in a vicious struggle against the Kingdom of Mysore, and though they were not actually at war, three previous conflicts had taught the British to prepare for a rapid escalation of the conflict.

  Rancour between the East India Company and the sultan of Mysore, Hyder Ali, dated back more than three decades. By the time Wellesley reached India, Hyder Ali had already died, but his son, Tipu Sultan, was proving to be an even more ferocious adversary. Tipu hated the British, and seized any opportunity to show it, entertaining his guests with a life-size mechanical tiger that appeared to be chewing on the throat of a British soldier. Clever hidden cogs and pipes made the man groan and his arm flail as the tiger sank its teeth in.

  Seringapatam, a town nine miles from Mysore, was the centre of hostilities. Twenty-four thousand British troops were deployed by the time Wellesley and his 33rd Regiment reached them in August 1798. With Wellesley leading from the front, the 33rd fought valiantly, forcing Tipu’s army into retreat. Buoyed by their success, in April 1799, the governor general, Lord Mornington, who also happened to be Arthur’s elder brother, ordered Wellesley to take part in a final push on Seringapatam. Under the command of General George Harris, a combined force of 50,000 native and British soldiers, including Wellesley and his regiment, pounded the fortress town.

  The British had made a small breach in the walls of the fortress, and on 4 May a final, decisive assault was launched. Seventy-six men, fortified with whisky and dry biscuits, led the bayonet charge into the citadel. Arthur Wellesley and his 33rd went in after them. During the subsequent fighting in the citadel, Tipu Sultan was killed. Though he had not struck the fatal blow, Wellesley was swiftly at the scene, bending over the sultan’s body to make sure he was dead. The Fourth Anglo-Mysore War was over.

  Wellesley went on to distinguish himself further in India, serving as the governor of Mysore and later successfully leading his men in battle against the Marathas of the Deccan Plateau. The Marathas were a proud and martial people and, of all the battles he ever fought, Wellesley would describe his fight against them at the Battle of Assaye as ‘the bloodiest for the numbers that I ever saw’.5

  In India, Wellesley earned his spurs. The recognition he received put him in the front line of battle against Napoleon’s army years later. His subsequent success against the French gave him the title of Duke of Wellington. Without India, he might never have had the chance to shine, and awareness of his debt to India perhaps added to his fascination with its most infamous diamond: ‘His Grace the Duke of Wellington, having manifested great interest in the precious gem, so associated with the land of the East, where his first, and not least glorious, laurels were won, attended several times during the progress of preparations …’6

  The idea, though, that he might have some part in the reshaping of the gem seemed fanciful. At the Garrard workshop, the Dutch jewellers spent weeks trying to come up with a way for the octogenarian to cut the first facet without wrecking the diamond. In the end, they embedded the entire Koh-i-Noor in lead, ‘with the exception of one small salient angle intended to be first submitted to the cutting operation’.7 ‘His Grace placed the gem upon the scaife 8 – a horizontal wheel revolving with almost incalculable velocity – whereby the exposed angle was removed by friction and the first facet of the new cutting was effected …’9 Having performed his duty, the duke left the diamond where it lay, walked out of the workshop, remounted his ageing white horse and rode away, barely acknowledging the near-hysteria outside.

  Inaugural cut complete, the Dutch masters were allowed to continue with their work. The crowds dwindled and eventually disappeared, and infrequent updates about the Koh-i-Noor made it to the back pages of the papers. The Iron Duke himself never lived to see the completed Koh-i-Noor. Eight weeks and four days after he had cut its face, on 14 September 1852, he suffered a fatal stroke, and died a day later.

  The diamond was finished days after Wellington’s death. The bill for the recutting came to £8,000 – the equivalent of more than a million pounds in today’s money. Despite all the assurances from Coster and Garrard, the Koh-i-Noor did not retain its size. Instead, what was left was unrecognisable. The cut had practically halved the Koh-i-Noor’s 190.3 metric carats to 93 metric carats. It now sparkled brilliantly, but could lie meekly in the palm of a hand. News of the reduction left Prince Albert shaken and he braced himself for savage criticism from the press and the public.

  In the event, however, and perhaps because the diamond had been so poorly received in its original form, Prince Albert got off lightly. All but a few newspapers praised the new and improved Koh-i-Noor. It was flatter than its original egg shape, cut into what jewellers called an ‘oval stellar brilliant’. Traditionally such diamonds were given thirty-three facets on top in ‘the table’ of the gem, and twenty-five facets below, ‘in the pavilion’. However, the Dutch cutters had given the Koh-i-Noor perfect symmetry with thirty-three facets both on top and underneath. In the pale light of the English sun, the Koh-i-Noor had at last learned to shine.

  As news of its beauty spread, for the first time since its arrival in Britain the diamond seemed to have been cut free of its bad luck. Instead of the curse being mentioned in the same breath as the diamond, the name Koh-i-Noor began to be associated with good fortune. Ships were christened Koh-i-Noor. Newspaper advertisements encouraged students to buy ‘Kohinoor lead pencils’ for their exams. In May 1853, the Cheshire Stakes, a popular and lucrative fixture in the flat-racing calendar, was won by a horse called Koh-i-Noor. Fictional works like Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, where a cursed Indian diamond is given to an innocent English girl who is, as a result, then pursued by angry Hindu priests, and Benjamin Disraeli’s Lothair, where the plot follows a bag of uncut diamonds once belonging to an Indian maharaja, became hugely successful.

  The diamond was now a celebrity in its own right, and had been set free of its foreignness. It was a British jewel for a British queen. Few thought about the boy who had once owned it. If they did, they would have known that while the world’s attention was on the Garrard workshop, Duleep Singh too had been ‘recut’.

  In 1852, while the Koh-i-Noor was being transformed on the scaife, Duleep Singh was undergoing a similar process in India. He had by now been in the care of the Logins for three years, and as a boy of thirteen had come to regard them as his parents. John Login’s opinion mattered to Duleep above all else, and he tried to please his guardian by studying diligently, maintaining a cheery demeanour and joining in parlour games. Over time, Duleep developed genuine fondness for the couple, referring to John as his ‘MaBaap’10 – a peculiarly Indian concept of ‘universal and complete parent’.

  Lena Login, who kept a meticulous diary of her time with the deposed Sikh sovereign, often thought about all that had been snatched from him: ‘One could not but have great sympathy for the boy, brought up from babyhood to exact the most obsequious servility …’11 If Duleep missed his old life, he rarely said so; there were intense flashes of anger or bitterness, but they did not last long. Under the tutelage of the Logins, Duleep learned to speak like a ‘Britisher’. He read his Bible, swapped Persian verses for English ones and devoured tales of life in ‘Blighty’.

  In time he even took a blade to his long hair, which had remained uncut since birth in the tradition of the Sikh religion. Having shorn away the outward signs of his origins, it became easier for Duleep to contemplate a more profound metamorphosis. Just over a year after the Koh-i-Noor had
emerged from its workshop completely changed, Duleep asked his guardians whether he might rid himself of his old faith entirely. Duleep Singh wanted to become a Christian.

  Lord Dalhousie greeted the news with mixed emotions. If Punjab perceived that its young maharaja had been forced to convert, this might become the spark for an uprising. Dalhousie demanded evidence that Duleep’s Christian revelation was real and was his alone. Writing to a friend, the governor general confided his unease:

  My little friend Duleep has taken us all aback lately by declaring his resolution to become a Christian. The pundits, he says, tell him humbug – he has had the Bible read to him, and he believes the Sahib’s religion … Politically we could desire nothing better, for it destroys his possible influence forever. But I should have been glad if it had been deferred, since at present it may be represented to have been brought about by tampering with the mind of a child. This is not the case – it is his own free act, and apparently his firm resolution.12

  Later in the same letter, Dalhousie recounted a story that may well have been allegorical if it was not actually true, describing it to his friend as ‘a sad thing’. ‘A coolie went up to an elephant and took away some sugar-cane which it was eating. The beast seized him round the neck with his trunk, put the man’s head under his forefoot, and leaning on it, crushed it like an egg-shell. The animal was quite quiet; but if even a dog will not part with his bone, why should the Behemoth of the land?’13 Dalhousie mused. ‘It is well these monsters do not know their strength, or fear to use it.’

  On 8 March 1853, Maharaja Duleep Singh, aged fourteen years and six months, converted to Christianity at a quiet ceremony in his home in Fategarh. Punjab greeted news of Duleep’s conversion with grief rather than anger. The feared uprising did not occur. The behemoth truly did not know its own strength.