Earlier this month Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar told the Supreme Court that the Kohinoor was given freely to the British in the mid-19th century by Maharaja Ranjit Singh, and had been "neither stolen nor forcibly taken by British rulers".
bccl
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 invitation. Distinguished visitors like Emily Eden were allowed 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.?
indianexpress
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 ten-year-old son of Ranjit Singh, was compelled to hand over the great diamond.
ibgnews
So who should now own the Kohinoor? 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.
File photo of William Dalrymple from BCCL
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 pressure. 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."
timesofindia
India's greatest diamonds ĄĒ the Darya Nur, the Hope diamond, the Noor al-Ayn, the Orlov and Pitt-Regent diamond ĄĒ 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."
(Dalrymple is the author of 'Return of a King' and co-writing a book on Kohinoor)
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