Should The Koh-I-Noor Be Returned? Mamdani vs King Charles III EXPLAINED

0:00Anita Anand:If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, ad-free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.empirepoduk .com.

0:18William Dalrymple:Well, hello and welcome to Empire, a special emergency empire from me, Anita Anand.

0:25Anita Anand:And me, William Drupal. We don't often get to do emergency pods, unlike our colleagues in current affairs. But suddenly, colonialism is all the rage. Comes a knocking at our door. It certainly does. And boy, does it?

0:39William Dalrymple:It's in the headlines. Let me tell you why we've suddenly pressed the plunger and exploded this particular emergency podcast. Headlines like this. Mamdani gives King Charles a royal brush back over a crown jewel swipe from India. there's another headline over here Mamdani's advice to royals give the prices diamond back to India New York Times we've got another one here New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani says he will ask King Charles to return cone or diamond to India the Independent and the Telegraph and the BBC look it's back bloody diamond that said though suddenly

1:17Anita Anand:so empire has turned into a current affairs programme

1:21William Dalrymple:this is an opportunity for us to give you a little bit of the background of this diamond and why I think it's fair to say Willie that the king and queen would really rather this hadn't come up again because they have done their best to pour sand water and foam over the inferno this this diamond created we

1:43Anita Anand:have been led to believe that they may or someone close to them may have read this book sources

1:51William Dalrymple:close to the palace might have suggested that the work that you have done has meant that nobody wanted to wear it during the coronation. And sure enough, this is the first time. A copy did find his way to the palace and was read. Well, I mean, sources close to the palace would suggest that is the case. Look, the point is, The curse in a nutshell. No man is ever going to be worthy to wear this diamond. It destroys all who come into contact. Only a woman can wear this. And so through the British royal family, anyway, from the time of Queen Victoria, it has been basically chucked at the Queen Consort, because if there's a curse, you can deal with it, until Queen Camilla, who said, I'm not doing that.

2:40William Dalrymple:I'm not wearing it. And so it wasn't worn during the latest coronation. But why is there a curse? Now, that's what we need to remind you in this emergency podcast, Willie.

2:49Anita Anand:Well, one element of the story begins, the story of the curse begins, I think, with something called the Simantaka Gem, which is the mythical gem in the Bhagavad Purana, part of the Hindu scriptures, which causes havoc in its wake. its wake it it it it kind of frames krishna krishna at one point is is blamed uh for for for various killings and thefts associated with this gem uh and he eventually has to go into the desert he has not the desert has to go to the jungle to clear his name um and there is this old tradition in indian gemology that diamonds are cursed that uh that there are gems which are lucky but diamonds are not among them and diamonds in fact can be if flawed and if not completely perfect they can bring incredible bad luck to people so there's an ancient indian uh belief system behind this story but it has to be said that the this particular gem has left in reality in history an astonishing uh sort of torrent of blood in this way i mean there are piles of

4:08William Dalrymple:bodies wherever this rock has rolled uh it has rolled over the dead and the grief stricken so um you know from that moment where it's conflated with the the the the gem of the sun god the mythical simantica willie when does it first pops up um as part of the peacock throne doesn't it

4:28Anita Anand:exactly so tell us where somebody writes about it in a sense there's two different versions of the story there is the uh there's the legend of the kohenor which a lot of which was put together by one man and I actually ended up finding the document, the very first document written in English by a colonial official called Theo Metcalfe, who was interested in gems and in fact got in trouble later for purloining them during the aftermath of 1857. During the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny, he got in trouble for pocketing gems of various Hindu dignitaries and things and getting sent back to England.

5:01William Dalrymple:Can we also add the fact that he was also pretty much a liar, liar, pants on fire. I mean, when he didn't know a thing, he made up shit. He did. And passed it up the Jane. Yeah, that's what he did.

5:12Anita Anand:And prior to 1857, he was commissioned, when this diamond first went into British hand, to go to the Red Fort, which was then, in the 1840s, still operational with Baha Dushar Zafar, the last mogul still in place, and go and talk to the old women in the harem. So he put together this document, which is the source of many of the legends. And the legendary history of the Kurnal goes that it was originally part of the, it was mined in Golconda, which is near Hyderabad, that it was part of the regalia of the Hindu kings called the Kakatias, who are from that part of the world, that it was looted by the sultans of Delhi, who lost it eventually to Babur, the first mogul, who then lost it to the Persians.

5:59Anita Anand:It then came back again, was reunited with the Mughal court. There's this kind of long saga. In reality, there is no completely certain verified mention of this stone, and certainly none under the name Koh-i-Noor, before it is stolen in 1739 by Nader Shah. And again, we found the first extant reference in a previously untranslated Persian biography of Nader Shah, telling the story of the looting of Delhi. And that uses the word for the first time Koh-i-Noor. So it's actually quite late. It's 1750, the first completely verifiable reference to this. But it obviously did have a history before then.

6:41Anita Anand:So, yeah.

6:41William Dalrymple:But also, but it was conflated with other things. So some people thought, you know, they might have been describing the all-off diamond and calling it the Koh-i-Noor or some other German calling it the Koh-i-Noor. But this one is actually called Koh-i-Noor. Now, just to remind you, Koh-i-Noor means mountain of light. That is the translation of the word in Persian. And so that first time where it's written down by Marvi as Koh-i-Noor, and he describes it as being on top of the peacock throne. Now, the peacock throne is not, as you might imagine it, a large chair replete with gems and diamonds. It's more an ice cream kiosk of an edifice.

7:18William Dalrymple:I mean, it is the most blingy thing you've ever seen. It's encrusted in all of the best jewels. it is replete with the very best gems that the moguls have. And Maravi talks about these peacocks at the top of the kiosk, at the top of the throne, and one of its heads is the mountain of light.

7:39Anita Anand:The eye of one of the peacocks.

7:41William Dalrymple:But it wasn't, Willie, the diamonds that we put in rings these days, it looked very different then. Can you describe what it would have looked like in that era?

7:51Anita Anand:First of all, before the discovery of the New World Mines in Brazil, first of all, then ultimately South Africa, where the biggest diamonds today come from, India was the source of all the diamonds in the world. It had a monopoly and it was one of India's great exports. I mean, we think that the pyramids were probably cut using Indian diamond tipped tools. and there was this rich tradition of knowledge about gems in India but there were also a large number of very big diamonds floating around in India we know for example that the great Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagara had an extraordinary collection of enormous diamonds and you know these must be diamonds that in all likelihood exist today and have names like the hope diamond or the Orlov diamond you mentioned, or the Koh-i-Noor.

8:40Anita Anand:But it's very difficult in retrospect to work out which of these diamonds is which and which one went in which direction. This diamond in the Mughal tradition was not cut like a modern Ratna's ring, you know, with a very sort of symmetrical cut. It was left, as our medieval ancestors, like their diamonds, as a kabushaw. And the Koh-i-Noor has this weird shape. It looks a bit like Arthur's seat with an enormous lump on the top of the tail. And in this form, it was used as the eye of the peacock in the Koh-i-Noor. And it was taken off by Nadia Shah from the Mughals to Herat, where Nadia Shah kept all his winnings from Delhi.

9:22Anita Anand:Enormous crates full of diamonds and all the greatest riches that the Mughals themselves had plundered from all over India.

9:29William Dalrymple:But when he got his hands on the Koh-i-Noor diamond, Willie, did it make him happy? Was he a happy man having claimed this?

9:36Anita Anand:Almost no one in this story is happy at any point after they've got the Koh-i-Noor. And Nader Shah was eventually hacked to death by all his cousins and brothers and family after he went a bit mad in the aftermath of catching the Koh-i-Noor. So Nader Shah gets hacked apart. His harem promised this diamond to his bodyguard if they will keep them alive during the night of chaos and bloodshed. And the bodyguard, one of whom is called Amishar Durrani, then run off with it. And eventually, Amishar Durrani, who becomes the first king of Afghanistan, basically uses the Koh-i-Noor as collateral to found the modern state of Afghanistan.

10:20Anita Anand:It is his central investment with which he then goes to war. And he leads a life of plunder and mayhem. But he does not die happy either because his face gets eaten up by a kind of dripping malignant tumor. And people describe him coating half his face like Robocop in metal. But the separation continues below the metal and bits of maggots drop out even as they eat up his face. It's a horrible, horrible story.

10:49William Dalrymple:God, it's so bad.

10:50Anita Anand:So, you know, he eventually dies. Well, he might have given them maggots and gnawing away at him for years. and it passes down through his son and grandson. Shah Shuja, or Mulk, gets it. His brother has it first and is blinded. He hides it in a crack in a prison cell where he's being incarcerated soon after being blinded with a red-hot needle. The diamond disappears for a while, but it turns up a local mullah finds it where it's been hidden and uses it as a paperweight on his desk. He doesn't know what it is. So for a while, the Koh-i-Noor, the most priceless jewel in the world, is being used just as a provincial mulus paperweight, which is a very nice detail I found in an Afghan chronicle.

11:39Anita Anand:Shah Shuja, his brother, gets hold of it. And he is, according to the Afghan chronicles, tortured by the king of the Sikhs, Ranjit Singh, to release it to him. This is a detail that the proud patriotic Sikhs strongly reject. They don't like it. They don't like the story at all, but it's there very clearly in the Afghan accounts. And so I'm sticking to that story.

11:59William Dalrymple:So at this point, and there is, as Willie quite rightly says, a huge to-do about which is the true story. The Sikhs insist that Ranjit Singh was awarded the Koh-I-Noor for his help in freeing Shah Shuja. But the Afghans say, no, no, no. So he tortured the son in front of the father and therefore tortured him and got him to give up this diamond that nobody wanted to part with. Why didn't they want to part with it? Because of the mythology around it. So the wife of Shah Shuja, the Rafa Begum, had said, if you throw a rock into the air and you throw one to the left and you throw one to the right and you fill it with all of the gold and jewels, that is what the Koh-i-Noor is worth.

12:42William Dalrymple:So that is the kind of mythology around this diamond. So it goes to Ranjit Singh. Now, so far, not so good for anybody who's owned it. They've died horribly and before their time. But what happens with Ranjit Singh is he wears it on his arm every day, not in any kind of kiosk or throne. He's going to wear it as if he's thumbing his nose at all powers, temporal and supernatural. Come get me if you think you're hard enough. and he gets away with it until he has a catastrophic stroke as an old, grey, wizened man. And he's lying on his deathbed. And then there's a bit of a confusion because he can't speak.

13:21Anita Anand:This plays out to this day. Even today on my Twitter, rival parties have been claiming it's theirs. The Sikhs have been saying it's theirs, while people in Orissa have been saying it's theirs. Why would the people in Orissa think they have a right to a denita?

13:36William Dalrymple:Well, Willie, they think that because there was a story that he was surrounded by Hindu pundits. And one of them said, wouldn't you like this to go to a statue of a god in Orissa? That would be very good for your karma. And Ranjit Singh, who couldn't speak at that time, signaled, yes, that is what I want. Whereas others in his court said, what are you talking about? He couldn't speak, let alone indicate that he wanted this gem to go to a temple in Orissa. So that's one level of irritation.

14:12Anita Anand:So this is the treasurer who's called Bely Misuram.

14:17William Dalrymple:So Misur Bely Ram is the man, he's a lowly guy, but all he has to do is look after the treasury.

14:25Anita Anand:And he hides it after Anderson dies to stop it going to Arisa. See, I'm not a Sikh or a Punjabi, so I think I'm more neutral about this than you. And I'd say that the actual claim of Arisa is actually quite a good one, and that he did give it to Jagannath Temple.

14:45William Dalrymple:Just a minute. I mean, I am a Punjabi, but also I understand about catastrophic strokes. strokes so if you have a catastrophic stroke mr i am with the erysons how on earth are you going to signal that this is what you want to happen because it's written in your will before you had a stroke that's not what happened at all that's what that's what the chronicles say anyway look so this is why there's a big row even to this day even on this podcast okay but what happens on his deathbed is his treasurer hides it so that no one can go and pinch it and give it to a god in Orissa or a member of the family can just hawk it off because there are also rival claims among the family you know this is a man.

15:30Anita Anand:Mr. Belyram thinks it belongs not to Ranjit Singh but to the state and so he thinks he hasn't got the right to give it off that's what I think the story is that's my version that that that he hides it. It's not your version it's the version. Well, that's what I was saying. It is what Mr.

15:45William Dalrymple:Belyram decided because the Hindu priest was saying... You've come over to my side

15:48Anita Anand:in the story now.