It is the best known and most controversial jewel in the Tower of London, but virtually everything known about the Koh-i-noor diamond’s history may be wrong, according to a new book.

Said to be 5,000 years old, and to bear a curse that afflicts any man – but not woman – who wears it, the jewel was surrendered to the East India Company by Duleep Singh, a boy maharajah, in 1849.

India has felt the sting of its removal ever since, with a collection of Bollywood stars and businessmen pressing the UK government in 2015 to return the “stolen” jewel, on the same legal basis as art looted by the Nazis during the second world war.

Successive British prime ministers have stared down India’s 70-year standing request, but a new study by authors William Dalrymple and Anita Anand finds that even Queen Victoria was “racked with guilt” about the way the diamond was acquired.

The monarch’s doomed relationship with Singh, the 10-year-old maharajah whose kingdom the British seized, is one of the more memorable dramas to be have played out in the glint of the 105-carat diamond, recounted in the book Koh-i-Noor, released in the UK on Thursday.

The diamond has never been more controversial. The Indian government is still pressing its request for the Koh-i-noor’s return. Pakistan has been making its own demands, and in 2000, even the Taliban wrote to Queen Elizabeth demanding the stone’s return to Afghanistan “as soon as possible”.



All three base their claims on a traditional history of the diamond that includes its discovery in Indian antiquity, its theft by marauding Turks and inheritance by successive lines of kings and princes, until it was won by a Persian warlord in a cunning turban swap.

Except, none of that may be true. “Every single item in that potted history has no evidence for it whatsoever,” said Dalrymple. And yet it has formed the backbone of virtually every account of the diamond.

The real diamond is set in the Queen Mother’s crown. Photograph: Dan Chung/The Guardian

There is no mention of the Koh-i-noor in recorded history until 1750. Nor was the diamond – contrary to popular belief, rather flawed and far from the largest ever discovered – particularly revered by its owners until the 19th century.

It was the British who made the Koh-i-noor an international brand when they claimed it from Singh and put it on display in London as a symbol of imperial might.

“It goes to London and bang! Six million people see it, a third of the British population,” Dalrymple said. “Pencils get named after it, restaurants get named after it. The Koh-i-noor becomes a brand.”

But Queen Victoria hesitated to wear the diamond in public for years after it was triumphantly presented to her in 1850, apparently stricken by the plight of its previous owner.

Singh, the last maharajah of Punjab, had his kingdom prised away by the East India Company, the conglomerate that became an agent of British imperialism in south Asia.

Company agents had arranged for the boy’s mother to be thrown in prison, to accelerate the surrender process. When Singh finally signed Punjab over, the Koh-i-noor was an explicit British demand in the terms of defeat.

The queen eased her conscience at Singh’s treatment by adopting the boy as her own surrogate son, and then years later, engineering an extraordinary reunion between boy and jewel.

In a Buckingham Palace drawing room, as Victoria watched, a then-teenage Singh was handed a newly recut Koh-i-noor. He observed it with “a passion of repressed emotion on his face”, Dalrymple and Anand write. Observers feared he might fling the stone out the nearest window.

But Singh knew his part in the royal drama. He approached Victoria, bowed deeply, and handed her the diamond. “It is to me, ma’am, the greatest pleasure thus to have the opportunity to, as a loyal subject, of myself tendering to my sovereign – the Koh-i-noor,” he said.

“Soon after, [Victoria] took to wearing the Koh-i-noor frequently and conspicuously,” the authors write.

Such episodes make Indian blood boil, but both Dalrymple and Anand insist their history neither firmly strengthens India’s claims on the diamond, nor excuses the way it entered British clutches. “We don’t come to a conclusion,” Dalrymple said. “We lay out the evidence.”

All the world’s diamonds before the 1720s originated in India – so the Koh-i-noor’s subcontinental origins are not in dispute. “But, that said, it’s passed between its owners violently at every stage,” Dalrymple said.

“When we’re dealing with stuff looted by the Nazis in the 1940s, there’s no question that any decent-minded person would give it back. Well, what is different about objects looted in the 1840s? I don’t know the answer.”

He called the diamond “a crucial lightning rod for our attitudes about colonialism”, one that grows in importance as Britain tries to boost economic ties with its former colonies in the wake of Brexit.



“The main problem is that the British don’t know their colonial history, because it’s not taught in schools,” he said.

Ultimately he thinks the continuing controversy over the diamond is a “self-inflicted wound” by the British.

By trumpeting the jewel as emblem of British conquest of India, at the 1851 Great Exhibition, which was attended by one-third of the country’s population, “they consciously turned it into a symbol of imperial loot”, he said.

And so it has remained, while other, arguably more impressive, Indian gems such as the Great Mughal diamond – now thought by some to be the Orlov diamond that resides in the Kremlin – have evaded similar scrutiny. The few minutes Duleep Singh spent holding the Koh-i-noor in the palace 1854 might be the closest any Indian gets to the jewel ever again.

Some have moved on. Last year the Indian MP and historian Shashi Tharoor released a book conceding it was likely the Koh-i-noor would never return. In its place he made another request: for an apology, and a token sum in colonial reparations.