Need for a comprehensive history of Kohinoor

Writing is a notoriously lonely act. It’s just you and your laptop, maybe a few sheaves of paper and a pen, for company. So when authors William Dalrymple and fellow Brit Anita Anand discovered they had a shared interest in the Kohinoor diamond, they jumped at the opportunity to work together. The result of that collaboration is a slim, but tightly-packed read, Kohinoor: The Story of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond (Juggernaut Books). “It was like being on an adventure with a mate,” says Anand about the partnership.

A race through history, the book begins with ancient Indian ideas about diamonds and moves on to the Kohinoor’s first definitive appearance in the accounts of Iranian ruler Nader Shah’s invasion of India in 1739. It then follows the diamond from Mughal India to Iran, Afghanistan, Punjab, and finally to Britain. The narrative tracks the countless murdered kings, tortured princes, and ruined empires the diamond left in its wake, thus giving an insight into why it is often referred to as the cursed stone.

As founder of the Jaipur Literature Festival and the author of White Mughals (2002) and City of Djinns (1993), Dalrymple needs little introduction; Anand is an acclaimed journalist and radio show host with BBC4 and her first book, Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary (2015) was about the descendants of the last rulers of Punjab. While they began researching early in 2015, the duo were forced to rush their deadline when a PIL filed in the Supreme Court last April raised the issue of whether Britain should return the diamond to India. It became clear that the stone was just as highly coveted now as it was before. More than ever, it was time to put out a comprehensive history of the Kohinoor.

By tracking its journey across South Asia, Dalrymple and Anand have set out to prove that in reality, there is no true owner of the famed Kohinoor. “What was exciting to us was actually the absence of early sources about the stone. Whatever Wikipedia might tell you, we actually don’t have a single reference to it before 1750, when it was seized by Nader Shah and taken to Iran, which is very late,” says Dalrymple. “Everyone from Afghanistan to Iran and even the Taliban can lay claim to it.”

(This piece first appeared in Harper's Bazaar.)

Also read – Jindan Kaur, a biopic waiting to be shot