Revision as of 13:26, 27 November 2016

Kohinoor: A journey, 1300-2016; Graphic courtesy: India Today, January 13, 2016

The Koh-i-noor: A brief history; Graphic courtesy: The Times of India, November 13, 2015

Dalrymple: Kohinoor not gifted; Britons, Ranjit took it by force

The Times of India, May 01 2016

“Ranjit Singh in a bazaar” from Harward Hodgkin's collection; Graphic courtesy: The Times of India, May 01 2016

Kohinoor was no gift. British took it by force, and so did Ranjit Singh

Shah Shuja Durrani's autobiography is clear on how Ranjit Singh tortured his son to make him give up the diamond, writes William Dalrymple

Earlier this month Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar told the Supreme Court that the Kohi noor was given freely to the British in the mid-19th cen tury by Maharaja Ranjit Singh, and had been “neither stolen nor forcibly taken by British rulers“.

This was by any standards a strikingly unhistorical statement, all the odder because the facts of the case are not really in dispute. In truth, Ranjit Singh jealously guarded both his kingdom and his state jewels, and spent much of his adult life successfully keeping both from the grasping appetites of the militarised East India Company . By forming an alliance with the Company , but maintaining the most magnificent and up-to-date indigenous army of its day , he made sure that no Briton could enter the lands of the Khalsa without an invita tion. Distinguished visitors like Emily Eden were al lowed to see the Maharajah wearing the great jewel on his arm during state banquets, but when he died, he left the Kohinoor in his will not to the Company , nor to the British, nor even to Queen Victoria, but to the Jagannath temple at Puri.

The British got their hands on the jewel only a decade later, after taking advantage of the Sikh divisions and general anarchy which engulfed the Punjab following Ranjit's death. They finally defeated the Khalsa during a series of notably bloody battles in the Second Anglo-Sikh War of 1849. On March 29, 1849, the Kingdom of the Punjab was formally annexed by the Company, and the Last Treaty of Lahore was signed, officially ceding the Kohinoor to the Queen and the Maharaja's other assets to the Company .

Article III of the treaty read: “The gem called the Koh-i-Noor, which was taken from Shah Sooja ool-Moolk by Maharajah Runjeet Singh, shall be surrendered by the Maharajah of Lahore to the Queen of England.“ On December 7, 1849, in the presence of the Board of Administration for the affairs of the Punjab, Duleep Singh, the tenyear-old son of Ranjit Singh, was compelled to hand over the great diamond. So who should now own the Kohi noor? The case is often made in India that as the Kohinoor was taken by the British at the point of a bayonet, the British must therefore give it back. Yet the reality is more muddy. While the Kohinoor certainly originated in India, most probably in the Kollur mines of Golconda, Persia, Afghanistan and Pakistan also have good claims on the jewel, as it was owned at different times by Nadir Shah of Persia, Ahmed Shah Durrani of Afghanistan, and Ranjit Singh of Lahore. All three countries have at different times claimed the jewel and issued legal action in attempt to get it back.

Moreover, as the third article of the Treaty of Lahore hints, Ranjit Singh also took the jewel by force, just as the British did. In the same way that British sources tend to gloss over the violence inherent in their seizure of the stone, so Sikh ones do likewise. Yet the autobiography of its previous owner Shah Shuja Durrani, which I found in Kabul when I was working on my last book, Return of a King, is explicit about what happened.

On arrival in Lahore, to which he had been invited by Ranjit on his fall from power, Shuja was separated from his harem, put under house arrest and told to hand over the diamond: “The ladies of our harem were accommodated in another mansion, to which we had, most vexatiously, no access,“ wrote Shuja in his Memoirs.“Food and water rations were reduced or arbitrarily cut off.“

Slowly, Ranjit increased the pres sure. At the lowest ebb of his fortunes, Shuja was put in a cage, and according to his own account, his eldest son, Timur Shah, was tortured in front of him until he agreed to part with his most valuable possession. On June , 1813, Ranjit Singh was received by Shuja “with much dignity, and both being seated, a solemn silence ensued for nearly an hour. Ranjit then, getting impatient, whispered to one of his attendants to remind the Shah of the object of his coming. No answer was returned, but the Shah with his eyes made a signal to a eunuch, who retired, and brought in a small roll, which he set down on the carpet at an equal distance between the chiefs. Ranjit Singh desired his eunuch to unfold the roll, and when the diamond was recognized, the Sikh immediately retired with his prize in his hand.“

India's greatest diamonds -the Darya Nur, the Hope diamond, the Noor al-Ayn, the Orlov and Pitt-Regent diamond -all have exceptionally blood histories, with long litanies of betrayals, blindings, thefts, torture, assassination and murder associated with them. My personal view is that looking into the distant past, and attempting to right wrongs with claims for compensation and restitution, while understandable, is little more than a recipe for conflict and division.History everywhere is full of horrors and where should the accounts stop?

Should the British sue Norway for Viking raids and Italy for the gold looted by the Romans? Should the Sri Lankan governments sue India for the destruction of the cities of Polonnoruwa and Anuradhapura by the Cholas in 993, when they invaded Sri Lanka, sacked all the towns, plundered the stupas and destroyed all the temples? According the Culavamsa chronicle: The Cholas violently destroyed here and there all the monasteries, Like blood-sucking yakkhas they took all the treasures of Lanka.They took away all valuables in the treasure house of the King, They plundered what there was to plunder in vihara and the town.The golden image of the Master [Buddha], The two jewels which had been set as eyes in the Prince of Sages, All these they took.They deprived the Island of Lanka of her valuables, Leaving the splendid town in a state as if it had been plundered by yakkhas. Rather than lawsuits, I think money and time would be better spent on proper education in history for all concerned. History is more complex and muddled than most people realise. How many Indians are aware, for example, of the bloody punitive raids the Chola navy made on the cities of Java and Indonesia when the coastal ports were looted and burned down? The British in particular need to learn what they did to pre-Colonial peoples across the world. For the same empire which led to the huge enrichment of Britain, conversely, led to the impoverishment of much of the rest of the non-European world. India and China, which until then had dominated global manufacturing, were two of the biggest losers in this story, along with hundreds of thousands of enslaved sub-Saharan Africans sent off to work in the Plantations. Yet, astonishingly , most British people are by and large completely unaware of the many horrors of their imperial history as it does not appear on any history curriculum taught in British schools.

We cannot change what has happened in the past, but we can try to understand and to learn from past errors and to make sure the worst of them are not repeated. For as Edmund Burke, the greatest scourge of the East India Company rightly put it, “those who fail to learn from history are destined always to repeat it."

1956: Koh-i-noor, not a stolen object: Government

The Times of India, Apr 20 2016

`Nehru said no ground to claim Kohinoor back'

The government pointed out that the solicitor general's statement in court that the Kohinoor could not be categorised as a stolen object merely reflected the position that governments have consistently taken since 1956 when Jawaharlal Nehru was the PM.“Pandit Nehru went on record saying there was no ground to claim this art treasure back. He also added that efforts to get the Kohinoor back would lead to difficulties,“ the statement said.

In fact, the ministry quoted Nehru as having said, “To exploit our good relations with some country to obtain free gifts from it of valuable articles does not seem to be desirable. On the other hand, it does seem to be desirable that foreign museums should have Indian objects of art.“ The ministry also claimed that ever since Narendra Modi took over as the PM, several significant pieces of India's history -a 10th century statue of Goddess Durga from Germany , an over 900-year-old sculpture Parrot Lady from Canada, and antique statues of Hindu deities from Australian art galleries -were brought back.“None of these gestures affected India's relations with Canada, Germany or Australia,“ the ministry said.

The Akali Dal on Tuesday contested the government's take on Kohinoor and called for immediate review of its submission made before the Supreme Court on Monday. “What the government has said in the affidavit to the court is far from the truth as it is not possible for a 10-year-old Duleep Singh to have given it or gifted it, that too to the enemy , unless he was tricked or coerced into it by traitors in his advisory council,“ said SAD MP and spokesperson Prem Singh Chandumajra.

Kohinoor's Kashmir connection

The Times of India, April 22, 2016

Advocating a diamond's human rights sounds as believable as 7-yearold Duleep Singh handing over the Kohinoor on his own rather than acceding to the domineering grownups around him.

Those adults included officials of the East India Company--victor of the First AngloSikh War--and a regency council stacked with machinating Sikh nobles. And on their agenda was war indemnities imposed on the Sikh Empire and its ruler, via the 1846 Treaty of Lahore. A subsequent Treaty of Amritsar was also signed to ensure the vanquished paid up and the Kohinoor, sent to Queen Victoria in 1850, was just part of the package. Among other items of the Sikh state on the block was “all the mountainous country with its dependencies situated to the eastward of the River Indus and the westward of the River Ravi including Chamba and excluding Lahul, being part of the territories ceded to the British government by the Lahore State according to the provisions of Article IV of the Treaty of Lahore, dated 9th March, 1846.“ That included Kashmir.

Serendipitously , the Dogra ruler of Jammu, Gulab Singh was only too willing to buy it.

Once he paid 75 lakh Nanakshahi rupees to the British, he officially became the Maharaja of J&K. Er go, the same treaties that saw the Kohinoor pass into Com pany hands and thence the British crown, also saw a Dogra become ruler of Kashmir. The “human rights“ and “social justice“ implications suddenly become clearer.If India ever challenges the British right to one coveted Kword, India's own right to the other coveted K-word--gained by the Instrument of Accession signed in 1947 by Gulab Singh's descendant--could also become shaky indeed. No wonder PM Jawaharlal Nehru warned way back in 1956 that trying to reclaim the Kohinoor “would lead to difficulties“. Hopefully the government won't fumble on this fact too.

Legal proceedings in UK

The Times of India, Nov 09 2015

The world famous Kohi-noor diamond

Elizabeth II may face legal challenge over Koh-i-noor

The 105-carat stone, believed to have been mined in India nearly 800 years ago, was presented to Queen Victoria during the Raj and is now set in a crown belonging to the Queen’s mother on public display in the Tower of London.

David de Souza, co-founder of the Indian leisure group Titos, is helping to fund the new legal action and has instructed British lawyers to begin high court proceedings.

The Koh-i-Noor, which means “mountain of light”, was once the largest cut diamond in the world and had been passed down from one ruling dynasty to another in India.

But after the British colonisation of the Punjab in 1849, the Marquess of Dalhousie, the British governor-general, arranged for it to be presented to Queen Victoria. The last Sikh ruler, Duleep Singh, a 13-year old boy, was made to travel to Britain in 1850 when he handed the gem to Queen Victoria.