Noble Blood - The Curse of the Koh-I-Noor

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

Over the centuries, the fabled Koh-I-noor diamond has been a symbol of conquest and power. Now, it sits in the Tower of London. But how it got there is a story of blood and tragedy. Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon — Merch! — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and pre-order its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. Hey, this is Dana Schwartz, host of Noble Blood, the podcast you are currently listening to. Just a few quick bits of housekeeping before the episode today. I wrote a novel called Immortality a Love Story. It's a sequel to the book I wrote last year. Anatomy, a Love Story. And if you liked that or you're just interested in spooky stories about 19th century British doctors,

please pre-order. 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 2023, I'm co-leading a pilgrimage to Cornwall to talk about Rebecca, the novel, and Daphne DeMorier, the novel's author, that you can sign up for. The company is called Common Ground. If you Google Dana Schwartz 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 too. So yeah, that's the housekeeping. And now let's dive in. In London on September 19, 2022, thousands of people formed a queue 10 miles long to pay their respects to the late Queen Elizabeth II 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 24 hours. But imagine you turned away from

the crowds 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 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. An awe-inspiring symbol meant to represent the wealth and power of British royalty. It is the Coenore Diamond, the Mountain of Light. One of the most famous diamonds in the world,

it weighs 105.6 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 tachymon. 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 III, might wear that crown with the Coenor dynes. at their royal coronation scheduled for next year, May 23. 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 2022. In seeing the Cori Noor diamond on Queen Camilla's head, one might imagine thousands upon thousands of mourners who flocked to a cremation in June of 1839 in Lahore. You might imagine Rajit Singh, the Lion of Punjab, first Maharaja of the Sikh Empire. His body displayed on a model ship with sails made of spun gold, the sandalwood smoking under his funeral pyre. One might imagine his Coenor diamond, passing hand to hand, and finally, into the palm of a young boy. His young son, Dulip Singh. 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 11, 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 1849, the British separated a little boy from his mother and separated a jewel from a continent. Ever since, many Indians have wanted the Kohenor Diamond back, but the call for reparations are 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 serious,

series of brutal conflicts, from the Mughal Empire to Iran, to Afghanistan, to the Sikh Empire in Lahore. India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and others have all made claims to the Khoinur. As of this recording, the coronation of King Charles and Queen Consort Camilla has not yet taken place. It is set for May 6, 2003. 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 89 bigger, but it looms large as a symbol of colonialism and imperialism. of Britain's erstwhile dominant over the subcontinent 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 Dana Schwartz, and this is noble blood. In the Bhagavad Purana, a revered Hindu text, there's a story about the most famous jewel in Hindu legend. The Siamantaka, sometimes described as a ruby,

sometimes a diamond, the sun god himself wore the dazzlingly bright Siamontaka 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 gemstone. Perhaps legend has it, the Siamontaka was, in fact, the diamond we know today as the Coenor, forged by the gods themselves. For the less legendary-minded among us, it's more likely that the Coenor was seaved 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 18th century, almost all of the diamonds in the world were from India. The Kohinor made its first definitive historical appearance in the Mughal dynasty, a Muslim empire that came to rule much of South Asia between the early 16th and mid-19th. centuries. The capital was in Delhi, and that is where the magnificent peacock throne sat, positively dripping with rubies, garnets, emeralds, 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 Coenor. In 1739, Nader Shah of Iran staged a bloody conquest of Delhi. In the end, he took the peacock throne out of India and the Coenur with it. Nader Shah wore it in his arm band alongside the Timor

ruby, which was possibly even more valuable at the time. The moguls did not consider diamonds as the most precious of the stones. They were more interested in rubies, the brilli's, the brilliant crimson. Nader Shah 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 in pulses of electricity, he may have had a glancing thought about the Kohinor 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 Shah was dead. The Kohinor 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 Durrani dynasty in what is considered the start of modern Afghanistan. The Kohinor had two sister diamonds that were also dispersed. The Daria Inor, or the Sea of Light, is now part of the Iranian crown jewels in Tehran's National Bank.

The Great Mughal diamond is probably now known as the Orlov 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 60 years after Nader Shah's death, Shuzha Shah was leading the Afghan Empire. To the east, Ranjit Singh was the first Maharaja of the Sikh Empire. He had captured Lahore and expelled the Afghans during the Anglo-Sik wars. Now he wanted the Kohinur back. To get it, he imprisoned Shuzha Shah, tortured his son, in the scorching sun.

and threatened to bring his daughters into a harem in the Sikh empire. To the point that Shuzha's wife threatened to pound the Kohinor into dust and feed it to the women of the family, just so Ranjit Singh would never get his hands on it. In the end, Ranjit Singh got the Kohinor. And he treasured it. He had two replicas made of glass, so the real diamond and the two-faces,

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 Kohinor 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 1836. His cremation was attended by thousands. But as much as he had loved the Kohinor 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. Duleep Singh was five years old when he became Maharaja. He was already forming a love of painting and purrs. Persian poetry. But the Kohinor was the size of his tiny bicep. 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 Ranjit Singh. What he knew was his mother, Jindan, who was only 26 years old when her son ascended to rule the Punjab. She was a fierce, lowborn, beautiful, woman who refused to be screened off in the woman's quarters. She was attentive when in 1845,

the first Anglo-Sic 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 Maharaja only under the so-called care of the British, only until he turned sick. they claimed. Maharani Jandan was not fooled. This was an occupying power, coercing her son to pay them to act against his interests in his name.

She told him to resist at every turn. The mid-19th century was not an especially good time to be a noble woman in India. Ranjit Singh had had 17 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 wood. Jindon had been the 17th and last wife, only 18 years old when she married the 55-year-old Maharaja.

Rumors swirled about her supposed sexual indebt. 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 Maharaja, have the right to separate him from the contagion of her evil practice. End quote. Slee P 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-Sic war erupted in 1848, 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 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 Duleep 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 Coenor, it said, must be surrendered to the queen, then Victoria, of England. The treaty is known as the act of submission. So by the age of 10, Duleep 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 threw Dulep an 11th 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 jewels, 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 sentries. I got out by magic.

I had told you plainly not to push me too hard." End quote. She walked 800 miles to Nepal. The history of colonialism is brutal, a history of bloodshed and children ripped from their parents. While Jindon did make it to Nepal, the British had beaten her there, and they gave her sanctuary 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 Dulep knew that his mother was trying to reach him. It's pure magical thinking, but the magical Coenor diamond will do that to you. In April of 1850, the Coenor wound up locked in an iron

chest on a ship leaving Bombay. You can be forgiven for hoping at this point. You can be forgiven for hoping at this in the story, that it drowned there, that it never reaches the British and concludes its 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 27, Queen Victoria survived a seemingly random assassination attempt in which a man caned her in the head. On June 30th, her former Prime Minister Robert Peel was fatally trampled by his own horse. That very day, the Coenor 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 that.

this. The ship carrying the Coenor was named the Medea, the woman of Greek myth who murders her own children in fury and revenge. If you're superstitious, you might wonder what the Coenor, at this point chained in irons, had in its carbon heart. Ten months later, Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, welcomed the world to London for the world's fair. They displayed the kohinor to the British public for the first time, and the British public was not impressed. Quote, to 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 koinor was never so much a diamond as it was a symbol, a symbol of conquest, of the lion of Punjab re-conquering 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 Coenor. But no matter how he displayed it, how he angled the curtains and pillows and gaslights, the magnificent mountain of light just wouldn't shine for England. So he decided to recut it. In early modern India, the prevailing trend was to take. cut diamonds in order to best preserve their size. But in England, the style was to sacrifice

size for sparkliness. And in July of 1852, gem cutters embarked on 38 days of work that would surgically anglicize the Koenor. In the end, what remained of the mountain of light was 60% of its original size. 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 1855, Queen Victoria debuted the new Coenure in a crown of gold and silver flowers, with hundreds of pearls and thousands of smaller diamonds. When her husband, Prince Albert, died, 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 Kohinur. 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 Duleep Singh. Under the influence of the British, he converted to Christianity as a teenager. He cut his hair against the sick tradition, grieving the Punjabi people he left behind. In 1861, after a separation of 14 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. Under his mother's influence, Duleep converted back to Sikhism. He fell out of favor with Queen Victoria and died in poverty in Paris in 1893. His children remained in England. We covered the suffragette. Sophia Duleep Singh on this podcast. Queen Victoria died in 1901 and a new line of

inheritance for the Coenor began. No longer did it pass on thrones and arm bands of men. Now the diamond moved from British Queen to Queen, the bobble 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 coinore passed from Victoria to the wife of King Edward V, Queen Alexandria. In 1910, it passed to King George the 5th's wife, Mary. It skipped Wallace Simpson and went to George the 6th's wife, who we know as Elizabeth the Queen Mother. That was in 1936. In 1947, 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 De Beers Diamond Corporation coined 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 1952, the queen mother wore the queen noor at her daughter Elizabeth II's coronation. As recently as 2002, it rested on a purple pillow on the queen mother's coffin.

Throughout Queen Elizabeth's 70-year reign, the coenor was hers to wear if she was. 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 koenor. The koinor sits in the jewel room in the Tower of London. On the the day of Queen Elizabeth's grand funeral, the Coenor passed to Queen Consort, Camilla. Will she dare wear it to the coronation in May of 2023? Calls for its return have grown stronger amid the prospect, and since Rishi Sunek became

Prime Minister of the UK in October of 2022. The question of repatriating objects taken by imperialism, 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? Doleep Singh is no longer alive, and he has no known legitimate heirs. Even if he's, he's, even if he's, he's, even if he's, 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 give 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 Kohinor from Duleep 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 Kohinur 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 Quran, after all, but doing so would destroy the diamond. Frustratingly, idealism doesn't align with reality. Here's what I know. The Coenor 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 Coenor diamond, but stick around after a prehistory of the Coenor diamond. brief sponsor break to hear about Duleep Singh's only reunion with the Stone. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Wodom. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place that come look for up and coming

talent. He said if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that.

There's a lot of luck. Listen to thanks dad on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Wodom. My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever.

I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place they come look for up-and-coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.

If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Queen Victoria adored the young Duleep Singh.

She found him charming, beautiful. He converted to Christianity, which pleased her. had brought him to England. In 1854, she commissioned a portrait of him by Franz Winterhalter, which showed him turbaned with a mini portrait of Victoria around his neck. Victoria watched the teenaged Duleep posing for a portrait, and something must have come over her, some twisted love or uncomfortable guilt or simply aesthetic inclination. She told him she had something to show him. And then, Queen Victoria handed Duleep Singh his father's diamond. He held the Coenor 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 emersoned, 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 novelesque, theatrical, this young boy holding his inheritance in his hand by the window cell. But it's also true. After some time, he gave the diamond back to the British Queen. Queen Victoria had never worn the coin nor 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 DeLeep Singh have done? Throne 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 Duleep Singh gave the Coenor 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 IHeart Radio and Grimmin Mild from Aaron Manky.

Noble Blood is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz. Additional writing and researching done by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is produced by Rima Il Kiali, with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive producers Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHart. Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Vodom. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to thanks, Dad, on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.