Empire

11. Queens and the Koh-i-Noor

2022-10-06 · 01:00 UTC ·Empire ·34 min read

Brief

The conversation then shifts to the Great Exhibition of 1851, where Prince Albert tried to make the Koh-i-Noor the glittering centerpiece of imperial Britain. Instead, the display was widely judged a fiasco. The stone, cut in the older Indian style, looked like an irregular rock rather than a modern brilliant-cut diamond, and Albert’s increasingly desperate attempts to improve the presentation did little to impress visitors. Determined to salvage the gem’s symbolic value, he ordered it recut in 1852 despite strong technical objections. Amsterdam cutters under Moses Coster reduced it from 190.3 to 93 carats, a drastic loss that the hosts present as both a material and cultural transformation: Britain was literally reshaping an Indian treasure to fit European tastes. In parallel, they tell the story of Duleep Singh, the deposed Sikh ruler from whom the diamond had been taken. Raised under British control, welcomed into Queen Victoria’s circle in 1854, and painted by Winterhalter in a highly charged imperial portrait, he became personally entangled with the object that symbolized his dispossession. In a central scene, Victoria tested whether he would accept her wearing the recut stone, and he ceremonially handed it back to her. The hosts close by arguing that the Koh-i-Noor still operates as a diplomatic and moral problem: a relic of conquest, a symbol of empire, and for many in India an active restitution claim rather than a settled inheritance.

Why it matters

William Dalrymple and Anita Anand recount that the Koh-i-Noor was shipped to Britain aboard the steam sloop Medea in April 1850; during the voyage cholera broke out, Mauritius refused the ship entry and threatened to fire on it as a 'plague ship,' and the vessel then sailed through one of the worst typhoons in a decade before reaching Britain.

Key details

  • The hosts link the diamond’s arrival to a series of contemporaneous misfortunes that fed its curse mythology: former prime minister Robert Peel was killed in a riding accident the day the ship entered British waters, and Queen Victoria was struck on the head with a metal-tipped cane by Robert Francis Pate shortly before formally receiving the gem, leaving her with a black eye.
  • At the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace, Prince Albert made the Koh-i-Noor the centerpiece, but the public was disappointed because the Indian-style cut left it asymmetrical and dull rather than brilliant; display experiments with velvet, mirrors, gas lamps, and a darkened viewing chamber failed to turn it into the sparkling imperial trophy Albert wanted.
  • Anand says the British understanding of the Koh-i-Noor’s backstory was heavily shaped by Theo Metcalfe, a young East India Company official commissioned by Lord Dalhousie to gather Mughal-era accounts from Delhi; she characterizes much of his surviving report in the Indian National Archives as unreliable, even though it influenced later royal and public ideas about the diamond’s history and curse.
  • Despite warnings from experts including physicist David Brewster not to cut the stone because of a flaw, Prince Albert brought in Amsterdam cutter Moses Coster’s team to recut it in 1852; the ceremonial first cut was made by the Duke of Wellington, and the stone’s weight fell from 190.3 metric carats to 93 metric carats, roughly halving its mass while increasing its sparkle.
  • The episode draws a parallel between the recutting of the diamond and the remaking of Maharaja Duleep Singh, who had surrendered Punjab and the Koh-i-Noor as a child in 1849; after being raised under British supervision, he visited Queen Victoria in 1854, became a favorite at court, and in a pivotal scene handed the recut diamond back to her, saying it gave him 'great pleasure' to present it to her.
Cleaned source text

title: 11. Queens and the Koh-i-Noor

author: Empire

content_type: podcast

publication: Empire

published: 2022-10-05T21:00:00-04:00

source_url: https://pdst.fm/e/chrt.fm/track/A27C8C/traffic.megaphone.fm/NSR6288710316.mp3?updated=1703674511

word_count: 7663