It may not be the biggest or most precious jewel ensconced in the Tower of London, but few diamonds have a legacy to rival that of the Koh-i-noor.
Likely to have originated in southern India, the diamond’s history is that of a great disruptor across the subcontinent, exchanging hands over centuries through acts of war, violence and assassination from Mughal emperors, Persian invaders, Sikh Kings and eventually snatched by the British colonial rulers of India.
Yet even as the UK has resisted decades of calls to return the gem, last week the disruptive power of the Koh-i-noor reared its head again.
As King Charles III was due to visit New York, the city’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, was asked at a press conference what he would choose to discuss with the British monarch.
“If I was to speak to the king … I would probably encourage him to return the Koh-i-noor diamond,” Mamdani replied.
The comments proved explosive. The New York Post criticised the mayor, calling his comments “rude” and lacking “maturity, grace and humility”. But across India, Mamdani’s remarks were widely met with celebration, reinvigorating calls for the Koh-i-noor – which is still mounted in the crown of Queen Elizabeth the Queen mother – to be given back by the UK government.
There was no confirmation if Mamdani, whose mother is an renowned Indian film-maker and whose father is from Kenya and a leading scholar on colonialism, raised the prickly subject in his brief interaction with King Charles III later on.
However, William Dalrymple, co-author of Koh-i-noor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond, said he was unsurprised to see the New York mayor bring the question of the Koh-i-noor to the fore.
“What people have got to realise is the Koh-i-noor is still a hugely emotional issue,” said Dalrymple. “On to this one little stone, sitting in a glass cabinet in London, has been projected all the pain that South Asia feels about colonialism.”
The storied stone has long said to carry a curse for men, with centuries of male owners perishing in assassinations, illness and war. Even after it was taken by British colonisers and set into the crown jewels, in the century and a half since, it has only ever been worn by British Queens, not Kings.
Today, Dalrymple described it as a “pocket-sized symbol of colonial loot and plunder” that still had an overtly unsettling presence.
“Even as King Charles is at the height of his acclaim after managing Trump and Congress on his US tour, he is then tripped up by the Koh-i-noor and its power to create dissension. It just goes on, decade after decade, dynasty after dynasty.”
As documented by Dalrymple and his co-author Anita Ananda, much of the mythology around the Koh-i-noor diamond was simply made up by a British bureaucrat. It was never the biggest nor the most legendary diamond owned by the Mughals, the Muslim emperors who ruled India for over 500 years, and wasn’t even recorded in their inventory of jewels.
Instead, it is one of many valuable gems set into the grand peacock throne of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, which was then looted in 1793 by the Persian ruler Nader Shah. Shah, who took the diamond to what is modern-day Iran, was the one to name it the Koh-i-noor, meaning mountain of light and began to publicly parade it.
After Shah’s assassination, the Koh-i-noor made it Afghanistan and then back to the Indian subcontinent, after it was acquired by Ranjit Singh, the founder of the Sikh empire in Punjab, who would proudly wear the diamond on his arm. After Singh’s death, it fell into the possession of his young heir, Duleep Singh.
But in 1849, as the British colonising force, the East India company, violently annexed Punjab, they forced the 10-year-old child ruler to sign the Treaty of Lahore. The handing over of the Koh-i-noor to Queen Victoria – which critics say happened under duress – was one of its key demands.
As Dalrymple emphasised, there is a great irony in that it was the British who were responsible for mythologising the Koh-i-noor as a potent symbol of the splendours of empire. Once taken, the diamond was presented to Queen Victoria, put on public display and then subjected to a botched cutting to ensured it fitted European tastes, before being set into the British crown jewels and becoming fully absorbed into British royal identity.
But after Indian independence in 1947, calls began for the plundered jewel to be brought back to India. The Indian government made several formal requests over the decades, as the diamond became an internationally recognised symbol of colonial pillage akin to that of the Parthenon marbles and the Benin bronzes.
Scores of Indian tourists visit the Tower of London specifically to see the Koh-i-noor and cries of “chor, chor”, meaning “thief, thief”, can often be heard as they go past the diamond on the moving walkway.
However, all requests for its repatriation have been refused by successive British governments, who maintain that the diamond was handed over in a formal agreement. In 2010, then British prime minister David Cameron said giving back the Koh-i-noor would lead to an “empty British museum”.
However, in what appeared to be a tacit acknowledgment of its controversial status, in a break with tradition, the Koh-i-noor was not used in the coronation of King Charles III.
To further complicate matters, India is not the only country to lay claim to the Koh-i-noor. In the 1970s, Pakistan made its own request, on the basis that the stone was taken from Lahore, which after partition is on the Pakistani side of the border. It has since also been claimed by Bangladesh, Afghanistan and even by exiled Taliban leaders after 9/11.
As historian Audrey Truschke pointed out, amid the controversy over ownership of the Koh-i-noor “it’s not clear to whom the British should return it. We all wish undoing colonialism’s harms was straightforward, but it’s not. And this is a good example.”
In recent years, efforts by the Indian government to push for the return of the Koh-i-noor have proved lacklustre. However, Dalrymple said that it was “not impossible that at some point in the future it will be used as a bargaining chip in relations between India and the British”.
“The British are going to need India more and more, and need Indian benevolence more and more,” he added. “The Koh-i-noor could easily become a major diplomatic grenade in decades to come.”