Introduction

120
Sabina Fazli
Punjab and the East India Company minutely regulated the ownership of the
Koh-i-Noor and made it over to Queen Victoria, thus providing a “legalistic façade”
in an attempt to erase its history as an object of plunder (Mersmann 178).
The greater part of the history of the Koh-i-Noor so far, as Mersmann remarks,
had been distinguished by “violence, dispossession, torture, extortion, [and] cruelty”
(177). On its arrival in England, rumours spread that the diamond was illfated
and even cursed. When Queen Victoria was attacked, shortly after the diamond’s
arrival in Britain, the public was quick to blame the cursed Koh-i-Noor
for the incident (Balfour 25; 28).
The almost magical properties which were ascribed to the diamond and its association
with India posed specific problems in its appropriation in England. The
Koh-i-Noor’s distinct biography was determined by its prestige as a symbol of rule
and power. Its new owners in England coped with these problems by containing
the diamond in a controllable frame. It was first presented to the public at the
Great Exhibition of 1851, providing a very particular space for the reinterpretation:
It was on display in the British department rather than in the Indian Court
(Mersmann 179-180). The Koh-i-Noor actually presented an antithesis to the
underlying idea of the Exhibition which was devoted to the display of neatly arranged
“classes of commodities”. The Koh-i-Noor stood apart as a symbol of a
pre-modern, Orientalist economy, of social and political concepts completely at
odds with those propagated by the Great Exhibition (180). It served as the symbolic
opposite of industrial mass production, which was imagined as democratic
and morally superior. The Koh-i-Noor was the fascinating but detestable exponent
of a society imagined as feudal and backward including aristocratic luxury
and over-consumption built on ruthless tyranny (182-183).
Before its exhibition, Queen Victoria had the diamond re-cut to remove a yellow
tinge, and its size was significantly reduced in the process (Balfour 27). In the
1850s Dalip Singh, its last owner in India, came to live at Queen Victoria’s court
and again presented the diamond to her as a gift. Both Arndt Mersmann and Jaya
Mehta emphasise this as an “element of subaltern resistance” (Mersmann 186;
Mehta 615). The gesture turned the diamond from a symbol of conquest into a
generous personal gift fashioning the giver as an equal to the Queen. In any case,
Dalip Singh’s token gesture renewed the public discussion on the Koh-i-Noor, its
alleged curse and also the legitimacy of its seizure, as Singh presented it as a personal
possession and not as property of state, which could have been confiscated
in war (Balfour 28).
The Koh-i-Noor was set in a circlet for Queen Victoria and later reset for
Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, but it was only rarely
worn. Mersmann argues that at the bottom of this could be the Indian Mutiny of
1857/58 together with the – perhaps unconscious – realisation of guilt as to its