BOOK REVIEW. The cutting edge

The most famous diamond in history, the Kohinoor, now the centrepiece of the Queen Mother’s crown and on display in the Tower of London, brought immense grief to most of those who possessed it. Humayun was exiled and had to part with it to keep his protector, the Safavid emperor, Shah Tahmasp, in good humour, while Shah Jahan who commissioned the Taj Mahal and the several times more expensive Peacock Throne, suffered a stroke and was deposed and imprisoned by his son, Aurangzeb.

Nader Shah, who carried the Kohinoor away in 1739, after pillaging Delhi and massacring 30,000 of the city’s inhabitants in one day, was decapitated by an assassin; one of his loyal generals Ahmed Khan, later known as Ahmed Shah Durrani, who got the diamond from his grateful principal widow, and who famously routed the armies of the Maratha confederacy at Panipat in 1761, found his face rotting away, with bits and pieces of flesh falling off all the time, causing his death.

Maharaja Ranjit Singh — one of the few compassionate figures of his time, and who kept the marauding Afghans at bay — was a rare one who retained the Kohinoor without disastrous consequences; his minor son, Duleep Singh, however, was not so fortunate. After being forced to part with it by the East India Company through a vile stratagem, he was forcibly separated from his mother, kept in foster care, never to see her again until he had grown up. A favourite of Queen Victoria for a while, Duleep Singh later voluntarily ‘presented’ the Kohinoor to her, thereby freeing her of guilt over its unfair acquisition that had consumed her till then. Duleep Singh, who rightfully should have been allowed to retain the Kohinoor, died in penury far away from the kingdom he should have ruled.

The Kohinoor’s reputation as an unlucky gem continued its run and hurt Queen Victoria — literally. Shortly before its much-anticipated arrival in 1850, she was hit on the head and injured by a walking stick wielded by a man for no apparent reason.

She also lost her confidante, the former prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, in a freak accident. Later, her beloved husband Prince Albert died of typhoid, sending her into a depression from which she never fully recovered. All this we know from William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, through their well-researched and wonderfully engaging book, Kohinoor — The Story of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond .

Character map Dalrymple and Anand also bring to life many interesting characters we know in passing, through contemporary accounts of travellers, record-keepers, soothsayers and historians; not all of them were Persian, Arab, Central Asian or Indian. Several, we learn, were European, such as the Venetian traveller Niccolao Mancucci and the French diamond merchant, Jean Baptiste Tavernier.

Shah Jahan’s court even had European jewellers, like the Frenchman Augustine Hiriart and Peter Mutton who was English, at their service.

While Kohinoor is the story of the best-known gemstone in history, it also doubles up as a brilliant fast-paced account of ancient Hindu and medieval Muslim gemmology, the myths and traditions associated with diamonds, the Mughal empire and its precipitous decline, the humongous wealth of India which attracted plunderers of every kind, accounts of the last brutal overland invasions of the country as well as the rise of British power in the sub-continent.

Not often does one come across the kind of raw, blood-curdling, stomach-churning gore that Dalrymple and Anand dish out in great detail in their book. How indeed can anyone possibly make sense of the ghoulish package Aurangzeb sent across to his father containing his brother’s head, or explain the frenzied slaughter of so many of Delhi’s citizens in the course of a day by Nader Shah, witnessed among others by a horrified Dutchman, Mattheus van Leypsigh?

One gruesome example in Kohinoor sticks out. After the capture of the southern Persian capital of Kerman, Agha Mohammad ordered the killing of all surviving men in that town, and by way of proof, Dalrymple tells us, “commanded that the men’s eyeballs be brought to him in baskets and poured on the floor. He stopped counting only at 20,000.

The ‘badlands’ “that Pakistan now struggles to control and administer, were, under the British Raj, ours too, abutting the staging posts of invasions of the Indian sub-continent over centuries; they continue to remain areas of darkness to this day. The penchant for beheadings, assassinations, murders, and the urge to blast ancient monuments to smithereens has never fully left the people there.

End of darknessKohinoor arrived hard on the heels of Shashi Tharoor’s widely publicised book, An Era of Darkness . While, in all probability, neither Dalrymple nor Anand intended it to be so, their book also comes across as a brilliant, understated, riposte to Tharoor’s endlessly discussed tour de force .

One cannot miss Kohinoor ’s implied message, conveyed in almost a whisper and in passing, that the rise of British power in India put an end to the darkness that repeatedly visited North India following the decline of the Mughal empire. If only for that reason, can we now please choose to ignore any demands for its return and move on?

Kohinoor is a scintillating work of exceptional scholarship, much like the highly engaging BBC podcast series, ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’. Rarely does one come across such fine, and enjoyable writing. It should rank amongst the finest books in English to have come out of India recently, and arguably, the best released in 2016.

MEET THE AUTHOR

Historian William Dalrymple is the author of City of Djinns, White Mughals, Nine Lives and Return of a King. Anita Anand has been a broadcast journalist in Britain for over 20 years. She has authored Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary.

The reviewer is a visiting faculty at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, IISc, Bangalore

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