The history of the KOH-I-NOOR DIAMOND | Why does India want the Koh-i-Noor back? Famous royal jewels

hi history lovers and welcome or welcome back to the channel where I bring you new videos every week on all aspects of the past for today's Deep dive into The Mists of time we're going to examine the history of the Kohinoor Diamond one of the centerpiece stones of the British crown jewels its name means mountain of light in Persian and it is arguably the most famous diamond in the world what's more it has had a roller coaster ride through history I'll be telling you about its mythical Origins the rather fishy circumstances under which it made its way from an 11 year old Maharaja in Lahore to Queen Victoria in England and the supposed curse it carries which makes wearing it a life-threatening undertaking if you're a man stay till the end and I'll give you an update on India's ongoing attempts to get the stone and why its use in British coronations is so controversial [Music] first things first the diamond goes under a few different names and spellings including Kohinoor and kuhanur all are perfectly acceptable as far as I'm concerned but I'll be sticking with Kohinoor for simplicity's sake speaking of pronunciations I'll need to say a lot of what are to me foreign language words in this video and I'm sure I'm going to get some of them wrong so please go easy on me in the comments I'm doing my incompetent best here I promise the diamond's Origins are shrouded in mystery and Legend it comes from India as almost all diamonds find prior to 1725 did for it wasn't until that year that the Brazilian diamond mines were discovered and according to a fun but Fantastical myth between three thousand and six thousand years ago a stone known as the Simon tiger Jewel was given to King sandrajeet of dwarka by the deity Surya then having been lost to jambavin King of the Bears it was recovered by one of sandrajit's subjects named Krishna the stone then caused more Havoc as the years ruled by as it was stolen and recovered with much blood being shared in the process there is no reliable evidence that this Stone was real or that it was the Kohinoor but the two have long been associated with one another in Indian legend moving forward in time to the year 1526 A.D we meet Zahir uddin babur a turko Mongol Prince from what is now Uzbekistan who in that year defeated the Sultan of Delhi and founded the Mughal Empire now what's important about babura is that he also kept a diary and in it he referenced a fabulous Diamond which is thought by some to be the corner so let's take a look at this source and see what it says for context we are still in 1526 and babura's son humayun has just defeated bikramjit the Raja of gwalior which is both a district and a city in India the family of the defeated Raja were then in the city of Agra and according to babura when humayun reached Agra they must have been planning to flee but his postings of man to watch the roads prevented this and guard was kept over them whom ion himself did not let them go they made him a voluntary offering of a mass of jewels and valuables amongst which was the famous Diamond which allahood Deen this was a sultan of Delhi who reigned in the late 13th and early 14th centuries must have brought its reputation is that every appraiser has estimated its value at two and a half days food for the whole world apparently it weighs eight Miss girls humayun offered it to me when I arrived at Agra I just gave it him back as you can see this description is very light on details and I'm afraid the diamond that humayun obtained though undoubtedly impressive cannot really be connected to the corner writing in the Journal of the British Institute of Persian studies historian Anna maleka has contended that the Stone's weight once converted into modern carrots was about 150 to 160 carats whereas the Kohinoor was 191.03 carats until the 1850s and we'll get to what happened to it in that decade in a few minutes obviously it cannot have grown in size in the intervening years and so this discrepancy rules out babura slashing my own Stone as being the kohenor on top of this the Conor prior to the 1850s was cut in a fashion known as the mugal cut which you see in this image but which was not used in India yet in 1526. finally records from the gems confirmed history tell us that it had obvious flaws prior to its recutting in the 1850s yet no such flaws are mentioned in the discussion of baburu's diamond admittedly this is just circumstantial as flaws wouldn't necessarily have been mentioned in descriptions of That Stone this all seems pretty conclusive but I'd like to add that other writers dispute how much the Barbara Stone of 1526 really weighed as converting old measurement systems into new is often very difficult so there's still an outside chance that the two stones are one and the same Barbara died in 1530 and the stone went to humayun he then gave it to the leader of Iran in 1544 and three years later he sent it to the ruler of ahmadnagar in the Deccan which is in the south of India the whether or not it arrived is unclear and that is the last we hear of it we now come to the 17th century in 1635 Emperor Shah Jahan ruler of the Mughal Empire in India celebrated the completion of the famous Peacock Throne upon which rulers of this Empire would sit and which we know for sure would later house the Kohinoor instantly I believe it's called the Peacock Throne because of the decorative peacocks on top of it we don't know when the stone was placed in this elaborate chair however and it is for this reason that accounts of some of the incredible diamonds associated with the Mughal Empire have sometimes been associated with it too in particular the writings of a French Diamond dealer named jean-paptiste Tavernier are often cited as references to this erstwhile diamond in early November 1665 during the reign of Emperor aurangzeb who was Shah jahan's son and who had deposed his father and placed him under house arrest Tavernier was finishing up a visit to India when he was allowed to see the emperor's Jewel collection he tells us that the first piece which Akil Khan that's the Jewel Keeper put into my hands was the great Diamond which is a round Rose cut very high on one side this is a reference to the style in which it had been cut on the lower Edge there is a slight crack and a little flaw in it its water is beautiful and it weighs 319 and a half rattus which make 280 of our carrots the Radice being seven eighths of our carrot when murga Mula I.E Emir jamla who betrayed the king of Golconda his master made present of this Stone to Shah Jahan to whose Court he retired it was rough and weighed then 900 radiss which makes 787 and a half carats and there were several flaws in it Tavernier called this diamond the great Mughal and he claimed that it was given to Shah Jahan in about 1656. his accounts of it are confusing though as elsewhere in his book he gives different weights for it than those just listed he also added that this stone is of the CM Forum as if one cut an egg through the middle as William Dalrymple and Anita amand tell us their book on the Conor is linked in the description box during the 19th century there was a commonly held belief that this great Mughal and the kohanor were one and the same nowadays however the diamond Tavernier saw is thought to be the orlov diamond which resides in Russia and is named after one of Catherine the Great's favorites and it does indeed look like the image Tavernier Drew of the great Mughal as you see here furthermore a 2008 article in the journal gems and gemology discussed the use of computer modeling to show that the Kohinoor could not have been cut from The Great Mughal as drawn by Tavernier because the dimensions do not work one simply would not fit inside the other Dalrymple and demand speculate that the actual cornor may not have been presented to Tavernier in 1665 because it was already part of the Peacock Throne or because it was still in the possession of the deposed Shah Jahan who didn't die until 1666 but will never know for sure in fact everything I've told you so far about the Stone's history is nothing but myth and conjecture and if the babura stone the great Mughal and the kohenor are all the same Diamond then this fact remains impossible to satisfactorily prove and its passage from the Deccan back into Mughal hands in India is still murky it is only in 1739 that we get our first definite look at the kohenor and that its confirmed provenance begins in that year the mukal Empire which was by then under the control of Emperor Muhammad Shah rangila fell to the forces of nadir Shah who was the leader of Persia AKA modern-day Iran upon seeing the stone for the first time nadir supposedly gave it its name by proclaiming koenor meaning mountain of light as I've already explained then took it as part of the Peacock Throne which you can see him sitting on here to Afghanistan however within a few years he ended up basically going insane with paranoia and was eventually assassinated in 1747. at that point the koenore which had by now been extracted from the Peacock Throne landed in hands of his bodyguard Ahmed Shah abdali also called Ahmed shadowrani he was soon proclaimed King of the Afghans and took the diamond to Afghanistan where it stayed with him and his descendants for nearly 70 years by the turn of the 19th century it was in the possession of his grandson Shah Zaman who was taken prisoner and blinded by a Chieftain called ashik sanwari in 1800 but not before he managed to hide the Kohinoor in the wall of his cell his younger brother Shah shuja took over as leader and in 1803 enacted a terrible revenge on those who had mutilated his sibling he had ashik's mouth filled with gunpowder then blew him up had his followers tortured into insanity and his wife and children fired from cannons it's these kinds of stories which would later feed into the so-called curse of the Kohinoor which we'll come to in a few minutes the diamond itself was recovered after research from an unsuspecting man who was using it as a paperweight and in 1808 a representative of the East India Company a Scottish Man by the name of Mount Stuart elphinstone reported seeing Shah shuja wearing it on an armband or bracelet I'm just going to pause for a moment to briefly explain what the East India Company was for those of you who are unfamiliar with it as it's going to feature again a little later in our story this was a huge British Trading Company which existed for over 250 years and which operated in many parts of the world but primarily in the Indian Ocean region at certain stages of its existence it had its own substantial Army and even controlled huge sways of India and it's this control which would eventually bring it into contact with the cornor by 1809 he'd been overthrown and four years later he found himself in Exile in Lahore in Pakistan having been released from a previous kashmiri prison thanks to the intervention of the founder of the Sikh Empire Maharaja Ranjit Singh who ruled over the Punjab region this encompasses parts of modern day India and Pakistan Singh demanded the diamond in exchange for his services and according to his own Memoirs shuja was unwilling to comply however further imprisonment deprivations and being forced to watch one of his sons being tortured finally broke him and in exchange for money and a treaty of friendship and unity he produced and handed over the diamond which had been in the care of his wife during his imprisonment she apparently said of the stone that if a strong man were to throw four Stones one North One South One East one West and a fifth Stone up into the air and if the space between them were to be filled with gold all would not equal the value of the kohenor Ranjit Singh held on to the diamond for the rest of his life wearing it at most if not all state occasions and having it set sometimes in his turban and at others in an armband with two more diamonds on either side after his death in 1839 there ensued a messy few years in which the throne changed hands several times before it eventually went to his infant son dulip Singh who became Maharaja in 1843 at the age of five six years and two anglo-cors later the British had annexed the Punjab region and taken control of the Lahore Treasury according to a book on precious stones written in 1856 quote the Civil Authorities took possession of the Lahore Treasury under the stipulation previously made that all the property of the state should be confiscated to the East India Company in part payment of the debt due by the Lahore government and of the expenses of the war end quote the 1849 Treaty of Lahore and you can see the city here with tulip's Father Ranjit in the foreground further stated that the jam called the kohenor which was taken from Maharaja Ranjit Singh shall be surrendered by the Maharaja of Lahore to the Queen of England and that history lovers is exactly what happened the Earl soon to be Marquess of Dalhousie who was then the British governor general of India has left us a fascinating though deeply problematic diary entry in which he discussed the koenore along with its reputation at that point what he felt it meant to those who possessed it and why he believed he was justified in taking it because take it he did in the modern era when colonization and cultural appropriation are so heavily frowned upon I think most of us will disagree with his reasoning but his diary offers a valuable insight into the mindset of a mid-19th century British politician and his Colonial attitudes he wrote that the kohenor has ever been the symbol of Conquest the Emperor of Delhi had it in his Peacock Throne while shazuja umulk was King Ranjit Singh extorted the diamond by gross violence and cruelty and deny when as the result of unprovoked War the British government has conquered the kingdom of Punjab and has resolved to add it to the territories of the British Empire in India I have a right to compel the Maharaja of Lahore in token of his submission to surrender the jewel to the queen that it may find its final and fitting resting place in the crime in Britain for there is not one of those who have held it since its original possessor who can boast so just a title to its possession as the Queen of England can claim after two bloody and unprovoked Wars Guided by this attitude Lord Dalhousie had the 11 year old dulip Singh who had been removed from the custody of his mother and put in the care of the British couple so John and Lena Lily Logan officially surrender the diamond to him after which he pulled it on a boat to England on the 6th of April 1850. it arrived at its destination on the 30th of June and on the 3rd of July it was presented to Queen Victoria this left authorities in the collective modes of the East India Company as they felt they owned the diamond and should have been the ones who got to gift it to the queen but al-hazi was determined to get the credit and as it happened the East India Company was nationalized in 1858 anyway and completely dissolved in 1874. the diamond had now entered the possession of the British royal family and to date it hasn't left the Conor at this point weighed 191.03 modern carrots and measured 40.85 by 32.57 by 16.18 millimeters it had 169 facets it was domed on one side and flat on the other and was likely cut into this so-called Mughal ship in the 1530s as that style of cutting only became popular in India which is where the stone originated remember and where we're assuming it was at that point in time at about that stage this is the stone as it was when it was placed into Victoria's hands thanks to her husband Prince Albert however it is not the stone we see today Albert was very taken with the Kohinoor and its fascinating history and determined to have it showcase to the public in the famous 1851 great exhibition which took place in the now lost Crystal Palace and which he had been heavily involved in planning Victoria wore it to the exhibition's opening ceremony after which the diamond was to be one of the highlights of the show it and the two diamonds which had been on either side of it in its armband were removed and displayed inside a golden cage mounted on prongs as you see here but unfortunately the viewing public find it rather underwhelming the fact that it was lauded as the mountain of light placed some very high expectations on it but English visitors were used to seeing diamonds which had been cut in what was then the modern European Manor which maximized their Sparkle the Kohinoor 16th century Eastern cut instead prioritized size over Glitz and it just wasn't as lustrous or as large as most had expected the Pearl lighting it was under in the Crystal Palace didn't help either nor did the fact that viewers had to look at it from a slight distance one spectator had the following to say about it notwithstanding the enormous value at which it has been estimated it has disappointed public expectation in no ordinary degree the ungraceful peculiarity of its ship and the ineffective manner in which it has been cut although more than half its weight has been wasted in the operation I'm not sure where they got that detail from but there's no reason to think it true having deprived it of much of the brilliancy and beauty of which no doubt the original stone wood in skillful hands have proved susceptible and in spite of the various experience that have been resorted to for the purpose of exhibiting it to the best Advantage it is still very far from realizing the anticipations that had been formed of its attractions Prince Albert was disappointed that it hadn't been more of a hit and in 1852 he ordered that the stone be re-cut in order to improve its Sparkle the Royal Jewelers garage brought in Cutters from Costa diamonds in Amsterdam who stated that the job could be completed with only a minimal loss of weight to the stone this was utterly untrue the first cut was made on the 16th of July by the themed 83 year old Duke of Wellington Victor of Waterloo this was presumably a publicity stunt which also meant that if the whole thing went awry some of the blame could at least be put on him after 38 days the alterations were complete then I oval cut stone had lost 43 of its weight and an eye came in at 105.6 modern carrots with 58 facets Prince Albert was not amused with the outcome but of course nothing could be done lie I also don't know what happened to the bits they cut off by the way sorry the main reason we know what it looked like before this change is that this glass copy as well as casts were taken of it before the cutting otherwise the Stone's pre-1852 dimensions and exact cut May well have been lost to us forever now if you've seen my video on another extremely famous diamond in the Royal collection the cullinan you'll know that cutting large stones into smaller ones so that they can be polished and worn is not an unusual practice but in the case of the kohenor which unlike the colony was not in its original rough State and which already had a long and famous history I have to say I don't think I would have done this to it just to make it certain 19th century European aesthetic preferences I look forward to reading your thoughts on the matter in the comments though perhaps you think it was worth it the diamond was Now set into various pieces of jewelry for Victoria who wore it among other things in a bracelet a tiara and the brooch you can see on her here she was a little concerned about donning it though for she had heard stories that it was cursed this wasn't helped by the fact that on the 27th of June 1850 when the stone was on its way to her she was assaulted by a man named Robert Piet who hit her over the head while she was out in her carriage in fact as author Danielle Kinsey has shown this course originated in the 1850s just as the stone was being taken to England and may have been started by the Delhi Gazette newspaper then taken up by The Illustrated London news when Lord Dalhousie heard about the rumors and that he was being blamed for the attack on the queen for having sent her the jewel even though it hadn't actually arrived in England yet at the time of the Piet attack he quickly moved to quash any suggestion of an ancient curse telling a correspondent in September 1850 that without going back to the first emperor who held it I would observe that nadir Shah who took it was usually reckoned well to do in the world throughout his life this obviously overlooks his unpleasant death and that Ranjit Singh who also took it and became from the son of a Perry zamandar which is a kind of landowner the most powerful native prince in India and lived and died the poor most formidable to England and her best friend has usually been thought to have prospered horribly as for tradition when sha suja from whom it was taken was afterwards asked by ranjit's desire what was the value of the Kohinoor he replied its value is Good Fortune for whoever possesses it has been Superior to all his enemies I sent the queen A Narrative of this conversation with sha suja taken from the mouth of the messenger in 1858 he wrote another letter in which he reiterated many of these points adding that he had only seen the rumor written about in an English newspaper that it had no basis in Indian histories of the diamond and concluding that if her majesty thinks it brings bad luck let her give it back to me I will take it and it's illuck on speculation the curse was therefore only born in the mid-19th century and as Dalhousie correctly pointed out plenty of men had owned it without suffering any overt bad luck at least not by the standards of the day we can also see how this pseudocos has evolved nowadays it is said to be unlucky for men to wear the diamond but in 1850 that detail hadn't been dreamed up yet and Queen Victoria herself was supposed to have suffered from it even when it was not yet in her possession in short we can discard any notion that this Stone comes with bad fortune it's a teal invented to make the diamond even more interesting and while bad things certainly happen to some of his owners that was largely because of their own greed in trying to acquire it and because of the era and area in which they lived when blinding political opponents and dueling out horrible executions was considered normal for another similar story of an imaginary curse on a famous gemstone see my video on the hoop diamond linked on screen and below for you let's return Nye to the young Maharaja dulip Singh whose story continued to be interlaced with the corners having been placed in the care of the Protestant John and Lena Logan he soon converted to that religion and by the early 1850s was expressing a desire to travel to England a wish which was grounded in 1854. Queen Victoria was quite taken with him and decided to show him his former Diamond now I cut to nearly half the size it had been when he last saw it Lena Logan recited the incident saying that all present endured an excruciatingly awkward 45 minutes during which the teenage Maharaja stood looking at what had been his Diamond just a few years earlier before returning to Victoria and quote as if summoning up his resolution after a profound struggle and with a deep sigh he raised his eyes from The Jewel and moved deliberately to where her majesty was standing and with a deferential reverence placed in her hand the famous diamond with the words it is to me Mom the greatest pleasure thus to have the opportunity as a loyal subject of myself tendering to my sovereign when Dalhousie later heard about the incident he was livid that Julie had taken credit for giving the stone to Victoria because as I've said he was determined to take credit for this in later life duleep Singh reneeked on his statement though saying that he wanted the stone back and that it had been stolen but as we know he never got it instead it was retained by Victoria and when she died it was inherited by her descendants as part of the British crime jewels it was set into the queen consort's crown for Queen Alexandra wife of Edward VII then into the crowns of Queen Mary in 1911 and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in 1937 where it remains to this day in the Jewel House in the Tower of London even if it is not cursed however it is controversial largely because of the way in which it came into the hands of the British and to finish the video I'm going to briefly look at the competing claims of several other countries who argue that it is rightfully theirs and should be given back to them first up we have India the diamond ultimately originated in that country and has been owned by a number of Indian rulers and Sikh maharajas as we've seen in this video right down to do leap Singh now there is no doubt in my mind that the way in which it was taken from him was very dubious indeed given his Youth and the duress put on him to surrender it and even commentators at the time including in the Times newspaper had qualms about the legality of its seizure as Lena Logan's description of the last time Julep saw the stone suggests even when he handed it back to Victoria and he was still only a teenager at that point remember it seemed to take an emotional toll on him and as noted he declared that he wanted it back in later life does that mean that it should go back to India though which has asked for its return numerous times since gaining independence in 1947. the lands do leap ruled over in the 1840s are not all in modern day India and in fact he was born and beast in what is neither Pakistani city of Lahore giving that country a potential claim the stone hasn't actually been on modern day Indian soil since 1739 when as we've seen it was taken by nadir Shah who was a leader in both Persia that's modern-day Iran and Afghanistan this has led some to argue that one of these countries should own it as have the many decades it spent on Afghan soil both Pakistan and Afghanistan have like India asked for the stone over the years however British prime ministers have always refused and said it will remain in the UK when asked about it in 2010 for example the npm David Cameron said if you say yes to one you suddenly find the British museum would be empty it is going to have to stay put so to sum up the core argument for continued British ownership is that it was obtained through the Treaty of Lahore and that its history is so messy it's impossible to settle on an alternate owner one could also point to dulip Singh's comment as a teenager that he was giving it to Queen Victoria though I think relying on the words of a dispossessed minor is quite shaky the diamond has a complicated history and I think it's unlikely there will ever be a consensus around the world about where it belongs the prospect of it staying in the UK is unpalatable to many Indians though as its seizure is seen as one of the many Colonial wounds inflicted upon the country and the dispute around its future ownership and use has not abated with time in October 2022 there was speculation in some news outlets around the world that it would not be used in the coronation of Queen Camilla to avoid inflamming tensions between the two countries a spokesperson for the Indian Prime Minister said that the coronation of Camilla and the use of the crown jewel Kohinoor brings back painful memories of the colonial past however as of the creation of this video it remains to be seen whether she will wear the diamond or not and this is one argument with no end in sight I hope you've enjoyed this look at one of the world's most famous diamonds thank you as always to my wonderful patrons for their generous support of the channel and if you'd like to join them and get access to some additional perks check out the link in the description box below thank you too to those of you who support the Channel with one-off payments using the thanks button below videos let me know below which country you think should possess the colon or an eye and until next week keep learning

Channel: History Calling

Views: 48,446

Keywords: why does india want the koh-i-noor, most famous jewel in the world, the history of the koh-i-noor, who owns the koh-i-noor diamond, most famous diamond in the world, the history of the koh i noor, the history of the Kohinoor, famous royal jewels, Royal jewels documentary:, history of the koh-i-noor diamond, queen camilla's crown, the history of the koh-i-noor diamond, how the koh-i-noor came to Britain, koh-i-noor diamond, Kohinoor diamond, koh-i-nur diamond, mountain of light

Id: ozADrmF6P_g

Length: 29min 44sec (1784 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 23 2022