Introduction

104
Sabina Fazli
dled them and cut them and traded in them. It was domination by a beauty
so pure that it held a kind of truth, a divine authority before which all other
material things turned, like the bit of quartz, to clay. In these few minutes
Bond understood the myth of diamonds, and he knew that he would never
forget what he had suddenly seen inside the heart of this stone. (Fleming
13)
Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, published in 1868, was an instant success and is
today viewed as the first detective novel written in English. Apart from inaugurating
a new genre, The Moonstone influenced a number of successors which take up
the idea of an Indian diamond as the focus of the plot and the object of detection.
Other literary diamonds which followed the Moonstone are Arthur Conan
Doyle’s Great Mogul in The Sign of Four, R.L. Stevenson’s Rajah’s Diamond in the
New Arabian Nights, and Anthony Trollope’s Eustace Diamonds in the novel of
the same name. Although The Eustace Diamonds is usually regarded as a realist domestic
novel, it still boasts two burglaries and a police investigation with no less
than three officers in search of the stolen diamonds, so that here again the diamonds
are the objects of detection.
Diamonds are present in literary texts as solid objects, as the focus of detection.
In this position they are naturally central to the plot. The detective discourse,
Elaine Freedgood asserts, is the area where things have to be read and are expected
to have a meaning as evidence and clue to the solution of the case (150). It
is therefore possible to read the diamond narratives as significantly shaped by the
diamonds and attendant connections which they introduce to the text. With the
precious stones not only the discourse of detection enters the stories but also their
place of origin in India. Although by the middle of the nineteenth century, other
sources of diamonds had been opened up, and the Indian mines had lost their
significance in the international diamond trade, the novels retain the idea of historical
diamonds with an identifiable Oriental aura.
On the other hand, diamonds work as vehicle for metaphor. Coventry Patmore
expresses the Victorian reverence for the ‘Angel in the House’ through a
comparison of Honoria with the Koh-i-Noor. In his metaphor, Patmore combines
the sacred domestic space and its representative with the ultimate symbol of
colonial rule in India, the ‘Jewel in the Crown’ of British imperialism. This yoking
together of the domestic and the imperial points to the multifaceted way diamonds
figure in literary texts, often uniting opposing qualities. The different interpretative
possibilities partly owe to the fact that, over time, diamonds have been
associated with different ideas. The Moonstone and its successors are imagined as
bearing a curse, while in folklore, diamonds have been thought of as a charm
against evil, possessing magical and healing properties) since the Middle Ages
(Harlow, “History of Diamonds” 127-128. This notion can be traced back to ancient
Indian sources which enumerate the beneficial use of diamonds as talismans
(Tolansky 747). The formerly positive properties of diamonds are hence turned