title: 8. The Koh-i-Noor Diamond
author: Empire
contenttype: podcast
publication: Empire
published: 2022-09-26T21:00:00-04:00
sourceurl: https://pdst.fm/e/chrt.fm/track/A27C8C/traffic.megaphone.fm/NSR2279471714.mp3?updated=1703674454
word_count: 8969
If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to Empire Club at www.empirepoduk.com Hello and welcome to Empire with me and Eater Arnand And me William Darwin Paul, I got it! It's like saying I'd be waiting for a week to do that. It's about very well done. Can I just say from a grateful world? Well done! Well done you for saying your name. Excellent! It's not everybody can do it! Anyway, this is Empire and can I just start off by again thanking you for the deluge of correspondence and affection and love and enthusiasm and encouragement. You really do make it worthwhile, so many lovely responses to last week's episode with Ramachandra on Gandhi. Willie, we've got some questions that have come in. This one, oh actually I've got one question, one tip bit. Do you want the tip bit or the question first? No, it's like a tip bit. You like a tip, oh I love the tip bit, you chose correctly. So you know I got rather taken and I have obviously declared my girl crush on Sarah LaDeevi, who was the rather spectacular woman who Gandhi fell in love with and we got an insight into the private versions of the Mahatma. Exactly. So this... Organising martial lessons from Indian freedom fighters. Yes and was the first person to you know insist on being taught science and all those wonderful things about Sarah LaDeevi. Well this is from Neil Mukaji who got in touch saying I'm so so happy you mentioned Sarah LaDeevi because she's a distant relative of mine and here's a little romantic fact about her. Her grandson married Gandhi's granddaughter. No! Yes! The grandchildren got a lot of gifts. I love that. They didn't. I didn't know that. I didn't know that. Isn't that fabulous? Yeah you chose right. I told you a tip bit. Always go for the tip bit. Now you've got the question. Okay. I've got a question. So this is from Robert Corcoran who says, William you mentioned in the East India Company episode that the company didn't hire people over the age of 16. Why was that? I'm not sure. I mean it definitely was a rule. If you missed your 16th birthday it was too late to join the company so presumably it was they wanted them young and impressionable. Your first year you got sent out to Calcutta to the writers building where there was a Fort William College and you went through a sort of rapid course in Hindi, Bengali, accountancy and all the other things you'd need age 17 to the Minister of Great Tracks of India. And if they were successful I mean many of them died that first couple of years and Park Street Cemetery is full of 16 year olds and 17 year olds who didn't make it through the cholera or the viral fever whatever it was of that first monsoon. But if they did get the antibodies within the first two years many of them who were successful would retire by 30 and get home and buy themselves a rotten bar and become an MP. You said that beautifully when we did that particular subject but there's a follow-up from Robert who says well yes you did say they've made their fortune. Is it because they were given vast salaries or was it through extracurricular activity that they made their vast fortunes? Like soldiers in the British Army at the same time and soldiers in the East India Company are me at the same time they were given famously low salaries and so it was only through extracurricular activities that they made these fortunes and these were not necessarily completely dodgy in that what they were allowed to do was was called private trading so they had the right to join up with an Indian partner and trade in Indian goods but you know this was contingent on having an idea of how to do this and certainly my ancestors there Dharumpal whose letters I've been through whose letters from his 16 year old self stuck in Calcutta not quite sure why he was there in 1755 and 1756 survive until he dies in the Black Calcutta in 1756. Is he gets into business with what he calls a banyam which means a trader and he buys a load of salt peter and he borrows money to buy this and he hopes he's going to be able to sell it in enormous profit but the ship sinks. So when he dies in the Black Calcutta he's already managed to lose entire fortune and dies with enormous debts so it wasn't necessarily that these young men you know went out with a sort of field gun and sort of lined people up and said hand over your hand over your goods the idea was that they traded and they used the name of the company and the prestige of the company and the authority of the company to presumably beat down their business partners and rivals and that sort of thing but it was that was how they did it that was the basic thing that they they would be traders in their own right so in addition to their jobs let's say you know running a district court in Moshida Bad or or being in charge of the customs in Patna or whatever their official company job was all these guys we busy doing deals on silk cottons and side orders of Samo says as we like to say yeah absolutely yeah so look another one here from Vine and then let's crack on with what we're here to talk about so Vine says an episode on maybe the non nonviolent players in Indian independence would be good he did enjoy the Gandhi one but what about the non nonviolent I'm thinking mainly of course of Burson Bucket Singh says Vinay I and I appreciate making this podcast a very critical juncture in world history Vinay thank you we are doing one non nonviolent person quite soon and that is with them saying who is somebody I've written a lot about so do stay with the podcast because we have got some of those avenues to explore as well plus we've had some goading I'd say rather than complaints goading from our Pakistani listeners that if we've had Gandhi we should have Jinnah and I think that's a very good deal I think they're absolutely right I think we should so let's do that and particularly as Jinnah I think everyone even even even his greatest critics would admit was massively caricatured in the Attenborough Gandhi film where he sits there cackling like sort of some vampire in the corner saying I will make India or break it or I will break India or make I can't believe it's all very sort of caricatured and he is an interesting character he is his character who is married to a party has an open top car it wears spats and co-respondent shoes and is very different figure from the austere and figure you see on Pakistani bankments yeah the moral of the story is do keep emailing and I know a lot of you say look are you going to move on from Asia yes we are and so we do appreciate your thoughts and we're we're William and I've got this virtual map where we're sticking all your suggestions and we will very shortly hopefully announce where we're going next we can't announce it now because we don't know but what we do know is we're going to complete this season which is yeah go on and get it well what we're here to talk about the Koehnoi time and now this is a I think we've been teasing you about for a long time and it is such a good time to be talking about this time and it is the very reason that William and I are partners in crime but we'll come to that in a minute but it's been in the news a lot after the death of Queen Elizabeth because almost immediately William it started trending in India give us the Koehnoi back right exactly and this is something that I think you know will surprise British listeners who do not necessarily associate the death of a queen with a stone they may or may not have heard of sitting in the Tower of London and in a sense this again takes us back to the heart of why we're doing this podcast the massively different perceptions of how Empire looks from the colonized half of the world as opposed from the Metropolis and the Koehnoi this tiny stone that now is not so tiny not so tiny it's only the size of an egg I mean I wouldn't say no to it's huge it's just imagine well it's big for a diamond but it's okay this stone this diamond bears the entire weight of colonial loot on it and everything that the colonial world stole from the colonized world is symbolized by this one small diamond it's a cold hard reminder of two Indians at least of their humiliation but it is also a prism through which we see the rise and fall of many different empires isn't exactly and so this episode and those that follow it and I think we're going to be doing four episodes on the Koehnoi with our Koehnoi knowledge because we love this story and it is the story that brought us together this story tells the very complicated story of this diamond and it's not the simple version that many people believe and well and he's do you want to talk about how we got together or shall we start on how on the myth of mythological we sort of start because William and I we we have done book tours on this and and William loves to start particularly in conservative audiences with this beautiful line which is everything you've ever thought you've known about the Koehnoi is wrong shit you're saying wrong now I've seen you make some you've trained me well I guess but I have seen you know sort of sorry clad three rows shudder with your introduction across continents true it's true but why why is it all rubbish what is the rubbish and and why is it rubbish so it's interesting in in the Indian press and in on a major series an Indian TV lately we've seen the entire mythologized version of the Koehnoi prehistory of the Koehnoi rolled out time and time again and I mean literally there must have been a hundred articles that have turned up on on Google News and on my feed in the last four nights all of which give this mythologized version of the diamond history for which there is not a single thread of evidence what's the mythologized version so this is this all goes back to the cacati it so tell us what what is being peddled out there yeah so the mythologized version is that the diamond was mined from a bottomless antiquity by slaves working in the deep mines of Golkonda that it this enormous diamond the largest in the world was found and the cacatiad dynasty in south India placed it as the eye of an idol in a great temple the temple was then raided by the wicked Muslims particularly the generals have allowed in Calgi who stole it and took it to Delhi and then successive murderous dynasties of Afghans and Turks stole it from one another till eventually it reached the hands of the emperor Barbaugh who then lost it and on it goes but the reality actually is that there is not a single historical mention of this until one of Nadeh Shah's biographers mentions it in about 1740 we're going to counter that my question to you is why has this fake news hashtag fake news even been released upon the world and you did a wonderful thing while we were doing this is you trace the source of said bullshit where did it come from it all goes back to a document written by a young officer in Delhi and I have held this document because it still survives in the bowels of the Indian national archives on what used to be called Rajput and which now is called well it's Katavya but of course you should know this I can't even imagine it's the road of duty the road and a ball to that you don't know this yes they'd be called that for two weeks so I've allowed not to release for the shame so what is it that you held in your in your hot little hand so in my hot little hand in the archive I just looked up in the Victorian indexes in the national archives I simply went to Cohenore got up the documents there were about 20 documents listed under this and the earliest is a document by a man called Theo Meckalf who's a young officer in Delhi and he was commissioned by his father's friend Lord Dalhousie who had got his hands on the diamond as we will hear soon in one of the episodes to come in 18 what year is it 1849 1849 on the 29th of March the diamond enters Lord Dalhousie's possession and he commissions this young officer who's in Delhi to get the juice on the diamond because Meckalf is in Delhi he knows all the princes and princesses who are still there in the mogul headquarters of the Red Fort in Delhi and he is commissioned to go up to the Red Fort and also to talk to the oldest jewelers in Chandichap and gather all the gossip and Theo does this and I can read to you the opening lines of his report and he says I cannot but regret that the results are so very meager and imperfect but first he says according to the traditions of the elders jewelers in the city of Delhi as handed down from family to family this diamond was extracted from the mine called Cohenore the mountain of light four days from azuli patnam in the northwest on the banks of the god of during the lifetime of the god christina who is supposed to have lived five thousand years hence and then all this other succession of dynasties is listed out just Jimmy give a night maybe imperfect as historians but we do a little better than go down the local shops and have a chat we do and and then say that this is history and that's what Theo Meckalf did he basically gathered gossip he gathered gossip from the jewelers in Delhi and from the Red Fort and that version has not only appeared on Wikipedia and on every single Indian news outlet but when you and I went to work on this we found that rather I mean disappointingly but fascinating as a historical thing there's not a mention of it before 1740 so it may have been the cacadid dynasty it may have passed the Aladdin Kilgit it may have been Barbos diamond there's a whole range of stories says he had to do it but nothing could be proved there's not a shred of genuine primary historical source for any of it okay well if you want genuine primary real hashtag real news stay tuned welcome back so we're about to take you on quite the roller coaster ride with the coin or diamond actually there is so much to tell you about this diamond so many dynasties has it passed through that we've decided that we're going to do a special two for one week so we're going to be releasing another episode of coin or on Thursday so two this week and two next week good because just the story is so so good and we want to tell you everything utter a complete mayhem what it is for four episodes now do you remember how this all came about it was at the gypo literature festival and we realized that you and I had both written in a sense two halves of the story or in our previous books that these were things we knew about we knew stories which we got from manuscripts which had never been published which had never seen the night today before and we realized that this one stone was in a sense a symbol for many Indians it represents everything that the British have taken from India the Koei North now sitting in the Queen Mother's Crown in the Tower of London for many Indians represents the looting the conquest and the and the pain of empire you know I mean you're not kidding I let my best swears all my swears at the Tower of London so when I was growing up it was the place that any visitor from India or Pakistan would say immediately coming out of Peter airport take me to the Tower and you would know where the Koei North Island would be because there would be knots of brown faces swearing in the most appalling way and using a word George George thief thief give it back to us and what's even more hilarious now is it because of these knots that didn't move they instituted a moving walkway now you know where it is because people are moonwalking backwards to stay in front of the diamond for the longest but you're quite right the last time it was seen out in the wild was at the Queen Mother's funeral it was on it's in the crown the Queen Consorts crown because we should say the the going or down we're going to go into this in much more depth if you have heard of it you all know it as the world's most cursed diamond that has led to not one single male regent wearing it in their crown for fear of this supposed curse which is it will reduce a man and his kingdom to ashes and only a woman can wear it within punty since we wrote this book I met someone who actually cued up to pay their respects to the Queen Mother and he said that the coffin was put in the middle of Westminster Hall next to Parliament lit from the back by this huge stained glass window and he finally got to the top of the queue and entered Westminster Hall just as the sun was setting and on top of the coffin they had the Queen Mother's crown and on top of the crown was the Koei North diamond and he described walking into the gloom of Westminster Hall and the light refracting through the Koei North you can see it from 200 yards away the light beaming out from there can I just say this sounds like a really good pitch for the movie right why don't you tell me this story all do you go oh it's a very dramatic I mean let's just say that did happen I like that I like that story we should say it doesn't look today as it looked before where we're going to start this story but but just describe when it looks like today well it's it's a really important point in fact that it doesn't look like it used to do because there are very different tastes for diamonds just like you know people like to have this sort of cooking and India and Britain so weirdly enough there is a fashion and styles for diamonds and in medieval Europe as in India people like their diamonds completely as they emerged from a mine with a little maybe a little bit of tinkering at some of the corners things but basically they like them natural as they appeared and what was important was their size but the Europeans from about the 16th century started getting very excited by elaborate cuts by what they call brilliant cuts which these facets would bring out the sparkle in a diamond but it often meant losing quite a lot of the diamond and you could often lose even 50% of a diamond to get that perfect symmetrical cut. Yeah I mean the brilliant cut is any of you who are lucky enough to have rings which have diamonds and it's pretty much that cut so whether it's a rose cut or a square cut they cut it for shine and well bling as we call it in this country a cut it for bling this is important because India before the discovery of the new world mines in Brazil and so on in the 18th century India was the source of all the diamonds in the world they all came from India and they didn't come interestingly from you know sort of King Solomon's mines from deep down in the in the earth with slaves with pickaxes smashing away at walls and chained together and suddenly discovering some diamond in actual fact they were alluvial they were they were found in the beds of dead rivers left by long extinct volcanoes from from millennia ago and so the image you have to have in your head of Indian diamond mines is more like I suppose our image of the Midwest or the the the gold rush with people sivving for gold nuggets and you take your sieve and you go through the salivate and maybe if you were incredibly lucky you come across a tiny natural octahedral diamond which is not uncommon even now in the god of our when you're saying so you know if you're lucky I mean these are teeny tiny things tiny tiny tiny things which are often I mean again very different from how we imagine a diamond when we see a cut diamond today in a ratna's ring or whatever it's this flat thing and it's shiny and that's a diamond is not a hedgeral crystal it's long it's like shape of your pinky yeah little pointy top but with the quirks of mineralogy occasionally you get a vast diamond you get an enormous thing the size of a quail's egg or evil epigencies well they describe it don't they the the kono when it when it was uncut when it sort of came into the world in its natural glory we think as the size and heft of a hen's egg and the important part of in a sense the story when we were trying to cut through the myth of the kono when we were researching this book and trying to actually find the facts is that it turns out that the kono is not unique today people particularly people from subcontinent have been brought up with a story of colonial looting and how this was the symbol of India oh they say it's the biggest it's the biggest the biggest diamond it's not the biggest today I think it's even as low in the rankings as as the 90th biggest I didn't I didn't check this time but every time I have checked it's slipping down the order because there's the Africa minds today are the ones that produce these enormous gems and every year a new one is found or released into the market because there's a monopoly it's another story but there's a fantastic world shenanigans in modern diamond marketing but the the Indian gems were not infrequently they were found very very large gems and these were a major early Indian export yeah and they were used both for decoration and and and for and for power and symbolism of power and rulership but it also was actually a useful tool of course because just like we used diamond cutting tools today they did an antiquity and I've read that many Egyptologists believe that pyramids were cut with early Indian diamonds and ditto you find them being used very early on in early china so at the very beginning of Indian history when when India's when India merchants beginning to travel through the Red Sea some of them arriving in Egypt some of them are bringing spices and the Greeks and the Romans are buying a lot of Indian products one of the first things that's coming into Egypt and hence across the Mediterranean to Europe are diamonds which are exotic they're not they did exist in Europe and for that reason they have a very very high value well you can also understand then why it is that these these gems in particularly become cemented in the western psyche as exotic and extraordinary and almost magical because the stories that are coming over with those people who are trading are also worlds that have no resemblance worlds of heat and spice and magic and all of those things sort of come like a cloak around these these diamonds from the east which is you know a place that most people are never going to see there's been an awful lot of very interesting scholarly work on this lately and for example they found that when they were looking at the mummy of ramacies the second they found Indian peppercorns up his nose as part of the mummification process ditto that using the Indian diamonds to cut the to cut the pyramids because it's from the magical land is that magical land but also it isn't just that it's a magical mystical thing there's very hard-headed Indian commerce as today it's a boxing ball and as the as today it's good Girati merchant right right right and so we there've been in the last few few years all sorts of stuff stand up and we could do an episode on this maybe one day the for example there's a new site that's been uncovered on the island of Sukkotra which is in the red sea between Yemen and Somalia and they found a cave that's basically full of full of first century BC Girati graffiti oh that's tremendous with all these sea captains some of whom are hidden do some of them are Buddhist heading to back and forwards to Egypt so again you know again we often think of India as being this sort of slightly sort of mystical country yeah up to all sorts of strange stuff in the ocean but it as ever as today it's a massive economic force it's powerful it's rich and everyone in the west wants not just the spices and the and the cottons they want the diamonds so look the reason we're telling you all of this and we're going to get to the star attraction the shiny star attraction of the Kona in a moment it's just to give you a sense of the world as it was and the Konaurs place in it now to look for the Konaurs the most reasonable place and we thought this one we were researching the book would be to go to India's answer to Samuel Peeps it's a man called Barbara he was a Mughal emperor 16th century and he know he writes about everything he writes a lot doesn't he I mean the Barbara Nama as it's called the book of Barbara is a really detailed thing and he likes to talk about gems doesn't he? so in 1526 the whole of Indian history changes in fact the whole history of South Asia and Central Asia has changed forever there's a completely improbable invasion of India by a man who's effectively a refugee and this man is Babu he's been kicked out of Uzbekistan by the arrival of the Uzbek's Babu goes down to Kabul and he uses this as a springboard to attack India which he reogh regards as a source of enormous wealth India he's not a country particularly likes he doesn't he doesn't want to be there but he wants the wealth of India and in 1526 he attacks the king of Delhi his man called Ibrahim Lodi and the first thing that his son whom Ion gives him when he arrives is an enormous diamond now that diamond may or may not be the going north the important point is that Babu fans the Mughal empire we're going to be talking a lot about the Mughals in this and many other episodes I think of this podcast because the Mughals are the the force that turns India into the premier economy of the world today we often think of India as a poor country or a third world country particularly people in in Britain tend to dismiss it in this way but for most of history India along with China is one of the two major economies of the world and under the Mughals it becomes the biggest workshop of the world what Manchester would be in the 19th century in 18th century it's Bengal there are a million looms in Bengal producing incredible amount of of silken jewellery and the Mughals who are often depicted in Bollywood films as these guys lying around in palaces dropping mangoes into the mouths of concubines with flattering white pigeons behind them like anything in life that wealth came from somewhere and a lot of that came from the wealth of the textile trade and it's this massive economic force and that's why you have in later periods you have all the first the Portuguese then the Dutch and finally the British going to India not because they it's some sort of Elizabethan you know save the children from charitable exercise it's because they want the wealth of India it's incredibly rich I just say that's your two cent in summary that's hilarious I mean I would have I would have summed it up they are not to India what the Romans were to Britain you know just this sort of arrival of an empire building sense they wanted to milk a place for every penny so but I like yours too okay so for our subject what's important is that they have a different idea of what's a beautiful gem previously in Indian history everyone had put diamonds at the top of the hierarchy but the Mughals like red stones they like rubies and spindles which is something we don't really talk about today which are these these red stones from Badakshan and the reason is that it's they're all over Persian poetry hafiz for daizy for daizy rights in the Shannami when the sun gave the world the color of the Spinell dark night set foot on the celestial vault so suddenly you've got to change in in the idea of what's important and the Indians who've been very very excited about diamonds now find that their rulers are are obsessing about red stones so barba doesn't our rather unhelpfully mention it but we do know we do if it's appearance in the Mughal dynasty but it's through a man called Shah Jahan now you might not have heard of him but you will have heard of his greatest hit it's his greatest work is the Taj Mahal which I'm sure any of you have been to India have tried to beat a path towards but he also made something else he made the peacock throne now that it's not a throne as we think of it today also it was worth four times what the Taj Mahal was worth within what I mean just describe that that peacock throne for us so the Mughals were very strong on their aesthetics they loved beautiful things they loved miniature paintings and the whole miniature tradition of the Mughals those beautiful images of all these tiny figures on these gorgeous manuscripts but they obsessed above all with gems and the Emperor Jahangir in the sixteenth century is a roughly a contemporary of Elizabeth I in England gets his nobles to give him gems on narrows which is New Year's Day and these guys line up and if they want promotion in court they have to give the best and biggest gem so by the time that Jahangir dies the Mughal treasury is heaving enormous gems enormous I mean there's there's loot itself but there's also they've they've captured quite a lot of the mines in the center of India and now everyone is buying these things in order to get preferment at court it's the quickest way to get a post job to become governor of a province or a major aristocrat and so when Jahangir Sanchaj Khan comes to the throne he finds vaults full of these things that are doing no useful job as far as he's concerned and he comes up with a brilliant idea of turning this it's had stagnant wealth sitting in vaults into something that can actually proclaim the power of the dynasty it's like Ali Baba's cave and just sort of sweeping it out and saying right I'm going to make a piece of furniture and they make a piece of furniture not just a piece of furniture the most valuable piece of furniture ever made and so they make this throne that is a domed covered object more like in our eyes a sort of ice cream key almost because then a throne is we think it's gaudy is anything is there? It's not a seat it's this domed baldech in or and they cover every sentiment of it with the largest gems in the world and it isn't just a shiny thing it's very cleverly structured so it reflects the throne of Solomon as written about in the Quran and as well as looking at it and thinking god these are the richest kings in the world there's also a sensation that a Muslim would immediately associate it with with King Solomon who's the symbol of justice who's the symbol of wisdom so this is an early example in a sense of using art for propaganda so Shajhant isn't master of this and he turns the jewel vaults of the local treasury into something that's actively an act of propaganda now claiming the power of the dynasties tell us tell us put us out of our misery is the kohenaw now going to make it's debut in the world so the kohenaw for the first time we can say with certainty the kohenaw is on the peacock throne it's on the top of the peacock's ring and the peacock's ring is named after the peacock on the top of the peacock's ring in some versions images there are two peacocks in one version one picture actually three peacocks on the top okay but according to the best source we have the kohenaw was the head of one of the peacock and this is marbite who tells us this this is the historian mark the first time we actually get the name kohenaw and we know that we're dealing with the stone which is now sitting in the in the Tower of London on the Queen Mother's throne the first time we can actually say there's no question it's he names it he names it the mountain of lies yeah there is a diamond yeah the size of a hen's egg and it is the head of the peacock on the peacock throne and this is when the peacock throne is already gone it's left deli by the stage it's been captured by the persian wait wait wait you're jumping ahead and there's too much good stuff here because at the moment so there he is Shah Jahar happily ever after sitting in his throne he'll rule for a million years on the throne of Solomon and yet and yet at the time in the at the time it's built that what the chroniclers in mogul India are pointing out are not the diamonds on the top which is what we are obsessed by they're pointing out all the red stones particularly timos ruby on there so we have lots of description of the peacock throne when it's first unveiled is this kind of incredible thing in the palace and everyone writes about it and there's many many caught but they don't point out the diamonds they don't really care but they really should because you know some may say millevalently that diamond is looking at the great mogul empire and rubbing its little faceted hands together and almost immediately that he builds this thing things begin to go wrong he has many sons and in almost every generation of the mogul empire there's a big squabble as the father has a stroke or or near's death the sons begin to arm themselves we had one very lovely son who it seems to be quite popular Darisie Quote every time Darisie Quote is the son that everyone was taken over one but like the kind of Tory party elections you never get the right one it's always you may say that I couldn't possibly comment but the thing is so Darisie Quote is the one everybody wants but then there's another boy the sort of the the millevalent boy the milleval one is the man who becomes the next emperor and takes the name orang zeb alamge orang zeb and he is there's that's wonderful accounts of the civil war leading up to by lots of European commentators yeah because at this stage lots of Europeans are going there because it's so rich that you have all these in the sense sort of poor Europeans going to work that rather than having in the 1950s and 60s Bangladesh immigrants coming to work the mills in in Bradford you have in the 16th century and 17th century European poor Europeans going to try and get jobs in mogul India right but just with orang zeb I mean the reason he's he's got a he's got a bad reputation among some parts of India others say he's one of the greatest muggle empress who whoever lived but certainly those who criticise him he was mean he you know possibly poisoned his brother and imprisoned his poor father his poor grieving father in a cell well one of the reasons why it's so interesting doing a podcast at this time in history that's dealing with Indian history is that Indian history like some other parts of it like for example the history of of Israel and Palestine where you have two different contested views of history which are completely adonced with each other and almost don't meet each other at any point this is now happening in India in India and between India and Pakistan so in traditionally in Pakistan orang zeb has been looked at as great conqueror as a great martial leader and increasingly in India and particularly now under the the new BJP Modi Hindu nationalist world of modern India orang zeb is the ultimate villain yeah he's the kind of kind of Dracula the Lord Voldemort they take your evil so put I mean put the Darth or accept one's time but the reality of orang zeb did he or did he not poison his brother and in prison is dad in a cell leaving him to rot away yeah there's several brothers now competing it is literally at the Tory party leadership you know you have too many contenders they're all suddenly popping up and as again with the Tory party leadership they begin to ally and make alliances and then one or another stabs the other in the back so the first one that joins orang zeb is murad but he's got orang zeb gets him drunk puts him in fetters and then feeds him poppy water so he loses his mind and goes mad he then defeats dharashuko in battle dharashuko is paraded through Delhi on the back of a dirty donkey and then murdered and he then locks his father Shah Jahan in the apartments of the royal palace in agra and effectively under very fancy as the rest and what we don't know is what happens to the diamond collection and this is one of the great mysteries because when there's a European jeweler who comes at this time called tavernier who's trying to gather diamonds for the the sun king for this is now the period of Louis XIV and Versailles and all that whole wonderful world of excess and far too much wealth and tavernier begins this process of these diamonds coming from Moglindia and going to Europe and he is finally after many applications is shown orang zeb's dual collection and he draws them so we get the first images of these and the koe nor is not there he talks about the great mogul down but it's a different shape and the reason is i think certainly if you put all the pieces together is that the reason he didn't see was it wasn't in the dual collection it was on the roof of the peacock's own still and while he sees orang zeb in this from a distance because there's a strict hierarchy in court and the the posh nobles are at the front than the lesser nobles in the middle and finally visitors like tavernier right at the back of the public audience he can't actually see these enormous diamonds flashing on the roof of the koe nor so again we have a detailed description of the mogul treasury and bizarrely there's no mention even now of the koe nor so where is the koe nor diamond right where does it pop its shiny little head up next so after the death of orang zeb the mogul empire which for 150 years has ruled all of india is the richest economy in the world covers not just india but modern pakistan bangler dash all of afghanistan the slither of iran this huge empire with a million men in its armies and the salable sort of fact in the center of Asia crumbles incredibly quickly the maratas ride out of the hills above bombay they capture surat the the great mogul port and the maratas for those again just they're they're largely based on what is now modern day maratra but a really martial race warrior cast if you like then there are the Sikhs in the Punjab who and they are they're threatening deli from the north and then the jats in your agra so you've got three different competitors and any one of them might seize deli and seize the the koe nor but it's none of them in the end they get to get this sort of right mango about to fall off the tree it's a complete outsider it is a man who comes from nowhere from Persia and his name is nadeeshha so nadeeshha is the son of a shepherd or a furrier from a very humble background he joins the Persian army and he rises to the top and he then does what we today would call a military coup he overthrows the south of indempa and he takes charge and he is a military genius he invents something or he uses something called the swivel gun which is like the kind of light tank of its time it's a huge gun a jazale which could be put onto a horse with a tripod and with that he expands the power of Persia but his enemies are his real enemies are the Russians and the Turks and he needs money to fight them so he says I'm gonna pluck some golden feathers from the mogul peacock's tail well now the mogul peacock's tail is is being presided over by a man who is very unlike orangs there so the time has now passed since orangs there the meany straight genius whichever way you want to take this has been on the thread it's now a man called Raqueli the common charringina who is one of my favorite characters in history because he's entirely an east-thete he slightly used this as a real man he likes a party he likes cross dressing he does he likes he wears pearly shoes and he wears pearly shoes yes and and actually doesn't care I mean you know there are whenever we've done this talk on the road there is one slide I beg you not to show and you show religious fervor just look at all the other trouble and every country I mean I look at all the aunties and swooning in the audience but it is basically ancient porn in the hummishah with his girlfriend with his girlfriend's doing things that should not be done in public but there he is doing it anyway it is our slideshow it is all about pleasure with with Rangila and he culturally hugely important figure he you know the sitar which now is in every indian restaurant is almost the you know the inevitable soundtrack of anything about India the sitar is introduced to court by Rangila the tabla again you've got one in this room I've got one here yeah is you know the the basic Indian drum today is introduced to court music by Rangila so culturally he's this hugely important figure militarily he's a complete teacher he's a strategic doofus Nadishah who's this sort of completely ruthless single-minded militaristic character with this small tight army that can't be defeated who's also humanist I mean you should describe we've done Rangila who's this sort of pretty boy of the local dynasty but then on the other hand you've got Nadishah who is austere he's austerity made flesh he wears black he has his sort of sharp pointy beard and facial furniture he never knowingly smiles in anything exactly let alone the kind of Rangila portraits I mean this this man is is a serious man so he goes out of Persia and he takes Afghanistan he attacks Kabul and the major central not not like you know a kind of poor war torn country this point but the summer capital of the of the Mogul empire it's a hugely rich incredibly sophisticated city he captures it without resistance he comes down the Kibapas he attacks Pashawa he captures that with that resistance and he captures Lahore and at that point finally Mahambishar Rangila gets his act together summons the nobles of his empire and three armies converge to place called Karnal so that there are 1.5 million men waiting in this camp trouble is that sorry just maybe you did just say 1.5 million people on Rangila side but we see to get the pressure that there are the more jugblers in such a camp that the whole of you know if you know Delhi that whole of Khan market has turned up all the ladies in their deer sunglasses all their 18th century equivalent are there this is the best I mean this is this why I love him he's such an idiot but spring he brings musicians he brings many chefs many different quizzies are on offer on the front line there are jugblers there's there's entertainment there are women it's like what's he doing it's like a small army but told up there is just one confrontation and and it's extraordinary it's I mean if ever this gets made into a film it would be a wonderful moment because the the cream of Mogul Shivari wearing heavy horse armor shining shining helmets gorgeous clothes and penance fine fine away yeah right out over five miles yeah on the planes of Karnal and they begin to charge the Persians deliberately retreat and withdraw pretending to be worried by this yeah and there's all these light cavalry at the front at the last minute just when the charges it has reached a point where it can't stop the light Persian cavalry part like a curtain left and right and there are these swivel guns these these these huge jazales facing them five minutes later it's all over yeah the cream of the Mogul army dead on the ground and that evening now you're shot knowing his enemy sends an invitation to Wrangila to come to dinner trust oh and what does this idiot do hello I'm your slaughterer would you like to come home for a bite tonight supper and what does Wrangila the Egypt do it's a rubs his hands absolutely and he comes over with his jugblers with his musicians and they have this lovely dinner together but at the end of it what can imagine Nadeh ashar snapping his fingers or whatever and and and all the the handful of bodyguards that Mahamad Shah has brought are arrested and Mahamad Shah and Gila is told that he's now the guest of Nadeh Shah he can't go back so the next day they send for more cockybides to keep him busy and day after that they ride into Delhi together with with Nadeh Shah and Mahamad Shah on the same elephant yeah and everything of course quickly goes wrong the people of Delhi rise up against the Persians who are busy sort of molesting girls and the bizarre and so on initially because of the surprise the people of Delhi massacre quite a lot of the Persian army but then Nadeh Shah comes out of the red fort with the cavalry with all the heavy heavy guns and there is a massacre it's just runs with blood so that the descriptions and there are lots of descriptions of this it is just a major event because it's a larger city in the world there's a million people in there yeah it is wholesale slaughter they just go and killing everybody and and there's I mean we have wonderful reports around bastards saying that this is the end the Moghlem Power which has run this part of the world for so long is now over six weeks later Nadeh Shah leaves Delhi with him he takes 10,000 wagons of jewels and gold the six weeks between the massacre and the departure are spent melting down the gold into Inga so they can carry it so they can carry and 8,000 wagons leave Delhi on the on the train and of course what happens is that the whole of every peasant farmer in North India then sort of raids the camp each night and you know they begin to hemorrhage jewels and gold even before they've left India but a lot of it makes it back to Afghanistan Nadeh Shah rules from Harat which is now but it's just on the border between Iran and Afghanistan and he puts this enormous loot in a castle called Kalat and at the center of it and he has a little exhibition he shows it to his troops and his men and then anyone else who wants to come and see it he actually puts an exhibition of all the loot he's taken from India and at the center of it are the mogul throans not just the peacock throan but three other throans as well and sitting there and this is the point when Mohammad Mahabbi the biographer of Nadeh Shah the court chronically says on the top of the peacock throan there is the coin on the mountain of life now there is I mean that's the history of it but the fantasy of it again I'm just telling you such a good story so the other story that has been really predominant about the kohenaw is that rangilo when rangilo idiotically accepts this invitation from his would be slaughtered so he hides the kohenaw in his turban because you know it's the safest place I don't know where to go but he goes to visit Nadeh Shah and Nadeh Shah has been told by a concubine in common that you know it's not that it's not so when they meet Nadeh Shah according to this apocryphal story that has really dominated for centuries that Nadeh Shah insists on doing the turban swap which is a which is a real thing it's a real thing in India it's where you need marriages as well you know you have the two sides come together and it's an act of respect here you take mine I'll take yours and apparently according to the story which is not true but it is the story that's prevailed he says rangilo welcome won't you take my turban and regilo goes oh crap oh oh and that's how the diamond passes but anyway okay so do you think this is a good place to pause it so we now have a diamond being the perfect purpose no we now have the diamond is now with Nadeh Shah it is in Persian hands but it's in Afghanistan and join us again to find out what happens does it do many good with him just a sneak peek does it do him any it possibly very definitely does not thank you very much for listening to our podcast if you like what you've heard there's more of that to come lots more there will be further blood goal and chaos and anarchy coming soon