ROYAL DIAMOND THAT DRIPS WITH BLOOD
As Pakistan and India demand the return of our most precious Crown Jewel, the thrilling yet brutal story behind it
LIKE the magnificent jewel itself, the story of how Britain acquired the Koh-i-Noor diamond has many facets. Some sparkle with intrigue, others are bloody and sordid.
The chief characters in this epic tale, recently drawn to our attention again with demands from Pakistan for the famous gem’s return, include a nymphomaniac queen mother with a taste for opium, an eccentric gingerhaired general known as Tipperary Joe, and a boy ruler.
Not forgetting the extras: tens of thousands of British and Sikh soldiers who died in the gruesome battles that decided the diamond’s fate 170 years ago.
Disembowelled on swords and bayonets or blown to smithereens by musket and cannon balls, they seem to vindicate the Hindu death curse said to haunt the stone: that ‘he who owns this diamond will own the world but will also know all its misfortunes’.
Despite this, ever since the British took it in the mid-19th century, claims have been lodged for its return by those who believe they are its rightful owners — including the people of India, the Iranians and even the Taliban in Afghanistan (because it was lodged there with a ruling family in the late 18th century).
Now comes a new demand from a Pakistan lawyer who, after years of campaigning and letter-writing, has been promised his day in court in Islamabad. There he will argue that the stone was ‘snatched illegally’ from an area that subsequently became part of Pakistan when India was partitioned in 1947.
His petition calls for a response not only from the British Government but from the Queen — appropriately, perhaps, as it was into her greatgreat-grandmother’s hands that the Koh-i-Noor fell.
It was less than ten years into Queen Victoria’s reign when the allconquering British, in the guise of the army of the East India Company, found themselves butting up against the last remaining major military force in the Indian sub-continent: the Sikhs of the Punjab.
The Sikhs had a powerful army, its 45,000 infantrymen and 26,000 cavalry well drilled, well armed and, in their chainmail, breastplates and helmets and wielding razor- sharp curved swords, considered the equal of any European force.
They had been assembled and organised by Ranjit Singh, the charismatic Maharajah of Lahore, founder of the Sikh empire and celebrated ‘Lion of the Punjab’ — except that by 1845, as the British cast covetous eyes on his kingdom, he was dead, leaving a son, five-year- old Duleep Singh, as his heir and a dangerous political vacuum.
At the centre of the struggle for power i n Lahore was the boy’s mother, the voluptuous Maharini Jindan, who because of her infant son had not committed suttee — burnt herself to death on Ranjit Singh’s funeral pyre — like his other wives.
She was described by the British as ‘a debauched woman of 33, very indiscriminate in her affections and an eater of opium’, and her court was said to be ‘a hotbed of vice’. Yet she
took charge, appointing herself regent, transacting state business and steering a canny course between the many rival factions in the land. One key faction was the Sikh army and in an attempt to keep it out of lace politics, she encouraged it to take on the British. A British army of 54,000 men on the frontier and biding its time — waiting, some historians would argue, for an excuse to invade the Punjab — took up the challenge. it crossed the border in December 1845, led by Sir Hugh Gough, a blunt anglo-Irishman (hence his nickname of Tipperary Joe) with a reputation for recklessness and a belief that