Local fighters launched an anti-British jihad

Britain’s presumed invincibility, on which premise the whole annexation of India had been built. Was this the beginning of the end for the British?

The ferocity with which the Sikhs fought certainly made it look that way. One observer noted how they would still lash out with their swords even when transfixed by a British bayonet in their guts.

Fortunately for the British, the weather intervened. Rain stopped play. After a three-day downpour, the Sikh army withdrew, leaving Gough to nurse the wounds of 2,300 casualties. He had survived — just.

But now the momentum was with him as he waited for reinforcements to arrive. Then, at the head of an army of 23,000, he advanced towards the city of Gujrat, where the Sikh army was massed.

This time he approached more cautiously and followed the military handbook. A hundred guns pounded the Sikh trenches in a two-hour artillery barrage, broke their cannon and allowed the infantry to advance relatively unscathed. The Sikhs ran as the British cavalry, sabres drawn, charged in to mop up any resistance.

The war for the Punjab — always a close-run thing — was over.

At his court in Lahore, ten-year-old Duleep Singh signed away his claim to the throne of the Punjab and soon afterwards the province was formally annexed as part of British India.

For the defeated Sikhs there was a price to pay, of which the ounce-anda- quarter Koh-i-noor diamond was just one part.

The peace treaty stipulated that ‘the kingdom of the Punjab is at an end and henceforth a portion of the British Empire i n India’. It added that ‘ the gem called the Koh- i - Noor shall be surrendered by the Maharajah of Lahore to the Queen of England’.

For much of i ts existence the diamond had been the booty of conquest and, in that sense, what happened in 1849 was no different from what had gone before.

The size of a small hen’s egg, it originated i n river silt i n southeastern India, first popped up in recorded history sometime in the 13th century and was installed as the eye of the effigy of a Hindu goddess in a temple.

With a value once lyrically described as ‘the expenditure of the whole Universe for two-and-a-half days’, it was looted by various warlords over the centuries before ending up in the treasury of Shah Nader of Persia in the 18th century, whose forces had conquered part of India. Koh-i-noor is Persian for ‘ mountain of light’, which legend says is what the Shah exclaimed when he first saw it.

When the Shah’s empire collapsed, one of his generals seized the stone