The Curse of the Koh-I-Noor

stories about nineteenth century British doctors, please preorder. It would mean so much. Pre Orders mean like a ton to authors. It's how publishers know which books to actually promote. Other than that, Noble Blood merch is available. I think you can probably still sneak it in if you want to

get a holiday gift for someone. The link is in the episode description and also incredibly exciting a next summer August, I'm co leading a pilgrim meage to Cornwall to talk about Rebecca, the novel and Daphne Dmurier, the novel's author. That you can sign up for the company is called common Ground. If you google Danish words common Ground Rebecca, it'll come up. I went on one of these last spring about Frankenstein and Mary Shelley, and it was just amazing.

It was like life changing. You get days just like reconnecting with your creative side, reading books, writing, talking to people, going on walks. I just I can't wait to go back, and I hope you come to. So yeah, that's the housekeeping, and now let's dive in. In London on September two thousand, twenty two, thousands of people formed a queue ten miles long to pay the respects to the late Queen Elizabeth

the Second at Westminster Abbey. A million people were estimated to have amassed in London to witness the funeral procession. Those in line waited as long as twenty four hours. But imagine you turned away from the crowd who were looking west towards Windsor Castle, the Queen's final resting place. Imagine you walked against the crowd three miles east along the Thames, all the way to the Great Fortress of

the Tower of London. If you walked into the inner ward, past the Neo Gothic gargoyles and into the Waterloo barracks, you would see it. The enormous diamond brilliant and gleaming mounted in a crown in awe inspiring symbol meant to represent the wealth and power of British Royalty. It is the Kohynor Diamond, the Mountain of Light, one of the most famous diamonds in the world. It weighs one hundred and five point six carrots, or more than a hundred

times larger than the average engagement stone. It sits at the front of the crown, in the middle of a cross made of thousands of smaller diamonds, the centerpiece of a velvet tap in brilliant purple with a white ermine band dotted with black fur. On Whose head has that crown sat? You might be imagining the crown perched on the procession of British queens and queen consorts at their

coronations Victoria Alexandria Mary the Queen Mother. In theory, Queen Camilla, the now wife of the new King Charles the Third, might air that crown with the Kynor Diamond at their royal coronation scheduled for next year May three. But and although this speculation, recent sources indicate that Camilla won't be

wearing that crown. Why well, because there's another side of British history, and the diamond in the crown also evokes a very different royal funeral from the one that occurred outside the tower walls during the summer of twenty twenty two. In seeing the coryn Or diamond on Queen Camilla's head, one might imagine thousands upon thousands of mourners who flocked to a cremation in June of eighteen thirty nine in Loore.

You might imagine Rajit Singh, the Lion of Punjab, first Maharajah of the Sick Empire, his body displayed on a model ship with sails made of spun gold, the sandal wood smoking under his funeral pyre. One might imagine his cognor diamond passing hand to hand and finally into the palm of a young boy, his young son, dew Leap sing One might imagine the ten year old signing the treaty that passed his diamond to the British. One might

imagine his birthday party one year later, age eleven. Now in the care of the British family he was placed in after his mother was taken from him, One might imagine the strained birthday celebrations. The young boy gifted with comparatively tiny jewels that had been taken from his empire only months before. One might imagine his mother locked in prison desperately trying to get to her son, and one

might get very, very angry. In eighteen forty nine, the British separated a little boy from his mother and separated a jewel from a continent. Ever since, many Indians have wanted the Cohn Or diamond back, but the call for reparations are especially strong right now because many specifically do not want the diamond sitting on the head of Queen Camilla at the coming coronation. Of course, returning the fruits of imperialist hunger may not be as straightforward as it seems.

After all, the diamond had had a long history before the British took it from India. Over the centuries, it was involved in a series brutal conflicts from the Mughal Empire to Iran, to Afghanistan to the Sick Empire in Lahore, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and others have all made claims to the Koynor. As of this recording, the coronation of King Charles and

Queen Consort Camilla has not yet taken place. It is set for May sixth, two thousand, twenty three, and so the diamond for now sits in the crown in the Tower of London, a gift or a stolen bounty, a beautiful adornment, or a cursed talisman that has left a trail of blood in its wake. It is not the biggest diamond in the world. There are eighty nine bigger, but it looms large as a symbol of colonialism and imperialism of Britain's erstwhile dominant over the sub the continent

and a big chunk of the world. The diamond is cut in an unusual way, said to look when viewed on, like a black hole. I'm Danis Schwartz, and this is noble blood. In the Bagavad Purana, a revered Hindu text, there's a story about the most famous jewel in Hindu legend, the sia Montaka, sometimes described as a ruby, sometimes a diamond. The Sun god himself wore the dazzlingly bright siam Antaka around his neck. When it made its way into the hands of men, it was a resplendent blessing or a

disastrous curse, murder and bloodshed attended the gems zone. Perhaps, legend has it the Simon Taka was, in fact the diamond we know today as the koey Nore, forged by the gods themselves. For the less legendary minded among us, it's more likely that the khey Nore received from a riverbed in India in unusual but not impossibly large diamond

the size of an egg. Today we may think of blood diamonds mined in conflict zones in Angola or Sierra Leone, but until the eighteenth century, almost all of the diamonds in the world were from India. The Koheynore made its first definitive historical appearance in the Mughal dynasty, a Muslim empire that came to rule much of South Asia between

the early sixteen and mid nineteen centuries. The capital was in Delhi, and that is where the magnificent peacock throne sat, positively dripping with rubies, garnets, emerald pearls, and diamonds at the top of the throne. Attached to the head of one of the peacock figures that gave the throne its name was the Coeynore. In seventeen thirty nine, nat A Shah of Iran staged a bloody conquest of Delhi. In the end, he took the peacock throne out of India

and the Koeynoor with it. Nattershaw wore it in his arm band, alongside the Timor ruby, which was possibly even more valuable. At the time, the Mguls did not consider diamonds as the most precious of the stones. They were more interested in rubies. The brilliant crimson Nattershaw was assassinated

by beheading eight years after acquiring his bounty. As his head fell into the arms of a nearby soldier, his last thoughts racing through his severed brain impulses of electricity, he may have had a glancing thought about the kohey Nore that glittered on his headless arm. He may have wondered, as many have since, if the diamond was a curse

to all its conquerors. Nader Shaw was dead, the kohey Noore and its blood red sister wound up around the arm of his guard, Ahmad Khan Abdali, who took the diamond with him as he led the Dorani dynasty in what is considered the start of modern Afghanistan. The kohey Nore had two sister diamonds that were also dispersed. The Daria Innor or the Sea of Light, is now part of the Iranian Crown Jewels in Tehran's now National Bank.

The Great Mughal Diamond is probably now known as the Oral of Diamond, named for the man who was the lover of Russian Empress Catherine the Great. It wound up in her scepter and is now in the Kremlin. Roughly sixty years after Natarshah's death, shujah Shah was leading the Afghan Empire to the east. Ranjit Singh was the first Maharajah of the Sikh Empire. He had captured Lahore and expelled the Afghans during the Anglo Sick Wars. Now he

wanted the kohey Norbeck to get it. He imprisoned shujah Shah, tortured his son in the scorching sun, and threatened to bring his daughters into a harem in the Sick Empire, to the point that shujah Shah's wife threatened to pound the koh Noor into dust and feed it to the women of the family just so Ranja Singh would never get his hands on it. In the end, Runjit sing

got the kohey Nore and he treasured it. He had two replicas made of glass, so the real diamond and the two fakes could travel on three separate camels, and a would be thief would never know which was real. Ranjit Singh was the first to prize the diamond on its own, to wear it separately from its ruby twin, in an armband that was often the only adornment he wore on his white robes. It was not the last time the kohey Nore would come to be a symbol

of empire. He had taken the territory and the diamond that had been taken by the Afghans, and he intended to show it. Ranjit Singh died in eighteen thirty six. His cremation was attended by thousands. But as much as he had loved the Coeynore in life, he seemed unable to escape its curse in death. His first successor was fatally poisoned, the next died of a smashed skull, perhaps a covered up bludgeoning. The third was shot in the

chest in a so called accident. That's how the diamond and the sick empire fell into a young boy's hands. Douleep Singh was five years old when he became Maharajah. He was already forming a love of painting and Persian poetry, but the coeynor was the size of his tiny bice up. As he struggled to wear the heavy stone around his arm. He was told he was continuing his father's legacy, but he couldn't really remember his father, the fearsome run Jeet Singh.

What he knew was his mother, jin Dan, who was only twenty six years old when her son ascended to rule the Punjab. She was a fierce, low born, beautiful woman who refused to be screened off in the woman's quarters. She was attentive when in eighteen for the first Anglo Sick War broke out against Britain's East India Company. She listened to the terms of the Treaty of Lahore at the end of the war, which stipulated that her son could remain Maharajah only under the so called care of

the British only until he turned sixteen. They claimed, Maharani Jindan was not fooled. This was in occupying power, coercing her son to pay them to act against his interests in his name. She told him to resist at every return. The mid nineteen century was not an especially good time to be a noble woman in India. Ranjit Singh had had seventeen wives. Four were burned with him in his

funeral pyre as sacrificial widows called sati. Seven enslaved girls had also burned in the smoke and skin and sandal would Jin Done had been the seventeenth and last wife, only eighteen years old when she married the fifty five year old Maharajah. Rumors swirled about her supposed sexual indiscretions, and now the British too had no use for a meddling young woman. They decided that her quote general misconduct and habits of intrigue are sufficient to justify her separation

from her son. The British government, being the guardian of the Maharajah, have the right to separate him from the contagion of her evil practice end quote. Doo Leep Singh at this point was nine years old. His fierce beautiful mother, his one truest protector, was thrown screaming into a prison cell. So when the Second Anglo Sick War erupted in eighteen there was no one to protect him this time. The treaty that ended the war did not even pretend friendship.

According to historians William Dalrymple and Anita Anand Quote, the child, terrified by the recent fighting in his kingdom, separated from his mother and surrounded by foreigners, was told he must sign over his kingdom, his fortune, and his future. His British allies now required nothing less than his complete acquiescence. The nine year old dou Leep Singh was utterly alone. In the first article of the treaty, he signed over

the entire territory of the Punjab to the British. In the second, he ceded all state property to the East India Company. The second article was not specific enough for the British, they included a third article all on its own, which solely concerned the coveted diamond, the kohey Nore. It said, must be surrendered to the Queen than Victoria of England.

The treaty is known as the Act of Submission. So by the age of ten, dou Leep Singh had lost his diamond, his kingdom, and his mother to the British. He was placed in the care of a British family, even though he had a mother who loved him, who was writing prison letters to her British captors, begging them in the name of their God, to reunite her with her son, promising quote, I will accept what you say.

There is no one with my son. He has no sister, no brother to whose care has he been entrusted end quote. The answer was John Spencer Logan, a Scottish doctor, and his wife, Lena Logan, was kind enough for a guy who was essentially an accessory to kidnapping. In one of the wildest anecdotes from this whole period, Logan through do leap an eleventh birthday party in which he showered the boy with his own jewels, recently taken from his kingdom

by the British, only the smallest of his jewels. Of course, we can imagine the sorrow of that little boy, draped in jewel rules, surrounded by strangers, without his mother. We can only wonder if any part of him knew that miles away his mother was trying to get to him. Yes, only a few days after her son signed the treaty, Ronnie Jindan, the absolute badass, dressed in rags and broke out of prison, leaving a note to the British. Quote you put me in a cage and locked me up

for all your locks and your centuries. I got out by magic. I had told you plainly not to push me too hard. End quote. She walked eight hundred miles to Nepal. The history of colonialism is brutal, a history of bloodshed and children ripped from their parents. While Jindin did make it to Nepal, the British had beaten her there and they gave her saying actuary only as long

as she promised never to contact her son again. It is probably too romantic and sentimental to imagine that something in young de leep knew that his mother was trying to reach him. It's pure magical thinking. But the magical coheynor diamond will do that to you. In April of eighteen fifty, the Coeynoor wound up locked in an iron

chest on a ship leaving Bombay. You can be forgiven for hoping at this point in the story that it drowns there, that it never reaches the British and concludes it's cursed magical existence at the bottom of the sea. It almost did. The crew of the ship came down with cholera. The ship got caught in a massive storm at sea. On June, Queen Victoria survived a seemingly random assassination attempt in which a man cained her in the head. On June, her former Prime Minister, Robert Peel, was fatally

trampled by his own horse. That very day, the cohey Nore arrived on the shores of England. I'll leave it to you to decide. If all this was the curse of the Diamond of the little boy and his mother, maybe it was pure bad luck. I'll just say this. The ship carrying the Coheynore was named the media the woman of Greek myth who murders her own children in fury and revenge. If you're superstitious, you might wonder what the khey Nore, at this point chained in irons had

in its carbon heart. Ten months later, Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert, Welcome to the World to London for the World's Fair. They displayed the Coe norths of the British public for the first time, and the British public was not impressed. Quote too ordinary eyes, said one reviewer. It is nothing more than an egg shaped lump of

glass end quote. Satire magazine Punch called it the Mountain of Darkness and claimed a Frenchman said that it shone with quote about as much light as the sun in England end quote. Queen Victoria herself, upon first seeing the gem, had dismissed it, remarking that it was so badly cut that it was spoiled all this blood and conquest for that. You might start to think, in the words of Ted Danson's character on The Good Place, diamonds are literally carbon

molecules lined up in the most boring way. But of course the koy Nore was never so much a diamond as it was a symbol, a symbol of conquest of the Lion of Punjab, reconquering his land from the Afghan Empire of British imperialism, forcing India to submit a symbol, albeit a symbol that, once gotten, the British public didn't

even really seem to like. Prince Albert was especially invested in rehabbing the disappointing koy Nore, but no matter how he displayed it, how he angled the curtains and pillows and gas lights, the magnificent Mountain of Light just wouldn't shine for England, so he decided to re cut it.

In early modern India, the prevailing trend was to cut diamonds in order to best preserve their size, but in England the style was to sacrifice size for sparkliness, and in July of eighteen fifty two, gem cutters embarked on thirty eight days of work that would surgically anglicize the Coeynure. In the end, what remained of the Mountain of Light was sixty percent of its original size, true to cursed form.

The man who made the first cut died of a stroke within weeks, but those losses didn't seem to matter to the British. They took the remains of their diamond, held it to the light, and saw it finally obediently shine. In eighteen fifty five, Queen Victoria debuted the new Coheynure in a crown of gold and silver flowers with hundreds

of pearls and thousands of smaller diamonds. When her husband Prince Albert, she dressed in all black for the rest of her life, as covered on this podcast, but in her very first appearance after his death, she also wore the Koeen nore. Her look in all black was coincidentally an exact inverse of Rajit Singh, who had worn the diamond over robes of white. Queen Victoria outlived do Leep Singh. Under the influence of the British, he converted to Christianity

as a teenager. He cut his hair against the sick tradition, grieving at the Punjabi people he had left behind. In eighteen sixty one, after a separation of fourteen years, he did finally see his mother again. Jindal, nearly blind, brought her fingers to her son's face. She felt the hard angles of jaw that had replaced the soft cheeks she'd known of her precious little boy. Un or his mother's influence,

Duleep converted back to Seekism. He fell out of favor with Queen Victoria and died in poverty in Paris in eighteen ninety three. His children remained in England. We covered the suffragette Sophia Duleep Singh on this podcast. Queen Victoria died in nineteen o one, and a new line of inheritance for the coyn Or began. No longer did it pass on thrones and arm bands of men. Now the diamond moved from British Queen to queen, the bauble in

a crown. A new myth took hold, wishful thinking perhaps that the diamond brought bad luck only to its male wearers. Maybe a matrilineal inheritance could avoid the so called curse. So the coy Noor passed from Victoria to the wife of King Edward the seventh, Queen Alexandria. In nineteen ten, it passed to King George the Fifth's wife Mary. It skipped Wallace Simpson and went to George the Sixth's wife, who we know as Elizabeth the Queen Mother. That was

in nineteen thirty six. In nineteen forty seven, India gained its independence and the Bloody Partition split the territory into India and Pakistan. The Punjab was divided between the two. The British Queen was no longer Empress of India. One year later, the Daber's Diamond Corporation coins the slogan diamonds are forever to this day. Harvard Business School uses the slogan to discuss marketing that artificially preserved the whole diamond industry.

In nineteen fifty two, the Queen Mother wore the kynore at her daughter Elizabeth the Second's coronation. As recently as two thousand two, it rested on a purple pillow on the Queen Mother's coffin. Throughout Queen Elizabeth's seventy year reign, the coy Nore was hers to wear if she pleased. She never wore it, wisely, perhaps, whether she was fear of international criticism or a curse. The large crown you

may have seen her in replete with diamond crosses. Purple cap and ermine band looks similar, but it's a ruby at the center and a different diamond at the base, not the coy Nore. The coy Noor sits in the Jewel Room in the Tower of London. On the day of Queen Elizabeth's grand funeral, the coyn Noor passed to

Queen Consort Camilla. Will she dare wear it to the coronation in May of Calls for its return have grown stronger amid the prospect, and since Rishi Sunac became Prime Minister of the UK in October of two thousand twenty two. The question of repatriating objects taken by imperialist conquest is a long and complicated one which we don't have time to cover fully or fairly in this podcast episode. The basic question is to whom do cultural artifacts belong to?

A person, a family, a dynasty, a religious group, a nation, a government, a geography. Doo Leep Singh is no longer alive, and he has no known legitimate heirs. Even if he did, was the diamond truly his or did it belong to something bigger and more nebulous to his empire or its subjects. The British have given no indication that they will of the diamond back, but if they did, to whom The

Sikh Empire no longer exists. The Punjab region from which the diamond was taken is now divided between two countries, Pakistan India and Afghanistan Iran, and smaller states and communities within them have all made competing claims. There is no doubt that the British were brutal imperialists who took the kohe Nore from doo Leep Singh, and there is no doubt that a long pre colonial history of brutality got

the diamond into his hand in the first place. Still, it doesn't feel right for the diamond to remain in captivity in England, a ready made symbol of imperial conquest. I'm honestly left frustrated by the lack of an easy solution. Could the kohey Nora live in peace in a museum between the Indian and Pakistani Punjab? Could it be divided like Solomon's Baby? There's a certain poetry to that idea. The peacock throne was meant to invoke King Solomon's from

the Koran, after all, but doing so would destroy the diamond. Frustratingly, idealism doesn't align with reality. Here's what I know. The koyn Noor has been in British hands for nearly two centuries, but it has a history of not staying in one place forever. That's the story of the bloody history of the koyn Noor Diamond. But stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear about Duleep Singh's only reunion with the Stone. Queen Victoria adored the young dew Leipsing. She

found him charming beautiful. He converted to Christianity, which pleased her, and she had brought him to England in eighteen fifty four. She commissioned a portrait of him by Franz winter Halter, which showed him turbind with a mini portrait of Victoria around his neck. Victoria watched the teenaged Dewleip posing for a portrait, and something must have come over her, some twisted love or uncomfortable guilt, or simply esthetic inclination. She told him she had something to show him, and then

Queen Victoria handed duleipsing his father's diamond. He held the coey nore again, this degraded thing, now half its original size and weight, so chiseled compared to the heavy stone he had worn as a chubby child in his mother's lap. His heart must have been aching. Who knows what he thought at that moment of his imprisoned mother, his departed father, his old empire, his old God, maybe of Christ, his loyalty to a new God, maybe his gratitude to a

new sovereign. Maybe rage and humiliation of revenge. It is novelsque theatrical, this young boy holding his inheritance in his hand by the window sill. But it's also true. After some time he gave the diamond back to the British Queen. Queen Victoria had never worned the coin, no er before then. Maybe she felt guilty after he gave it back to her, though maybe it was like she had been given permission. She started wearing it. But I can't help but wonder

what else could de Leipsing have done? Thrown it out the window, smashed it, swallowed it. Diamonds are not, in fact indestructible. Acetone, chlorine bleach, extreme high temperatures all can damage them, but a boy's hand cannot. So de leip Sing gave the Kynore to England for a second time, this time not to faceless Britain in a treaty, but to the Queen herself in an intimate handoff. We cannot and will never know what it must have felt like

and how much it might have hurt. Noble Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Mankey. Noble Blood is hosted by me Danishwartz. Additional writing and researching done by Hannah Johnston, hannah's Wick, Miura Hayward, Courtney Sunder and Laurie Goodman. The show is produced by rema Il Kayali, with supervising producer Josh Thaine and executive producers Aaron Mankey Alex Williams and Matt Frederick.

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