Introduction

Indian Diamonds 139
Gendering the ‘Jewel in the Crown’
India is the space primarily associated with diamonds, regardless of the decline in
its exports since the early eighteenth century. With the seizure of the Koh-i-Noor,
its representative in the English crown is a diamond, and the appellation of ‘Jewel
in the Crown’ captures the combination of the object and its source. India is thus
closely associated with diamonds, but it is also perceived as a female space.
Coventry Patmore who celebrates the domestic virtues of Honoria compares
“a woman” to a “foreign land” which has to be discovered, just after having likened
her to the Koh-i-Noor (Patmore 186). He draws on the prevalent imperial
notion that “whole continents and worlds exist as mysteries to be solved by Europeans
[…]” (Mehta 612), meaning European men. In the logic of binary oppositions,
woman is thus othered as alien, and non-European spaces are in turn gendered
as female.
The colonial counterpart to Daly’s domestic imagery of diamonds is the
“treasure trove”, a female space where male adventurers conquer diamonds as
prize and reward for endured hardship (Daly 71). The active male colonialist can
thus seize and dominate the passive,female land by maintaining a neat binary opposition
[i]n that colonization was a struggle for supremacy, not only white against
black, but between European nations, the scramble for territory took on
the aspect of a conflict between competing virilities. From this it becomes
clear how the ranking of cultures relative to a dominant and warlike Europe
might have led to the feminization of other peoples […]. The people of India,
especially of Bengal, were typically characterized as passive, soft, seductive,
languid, and generally effeminate […]. (Boehmer 82)
The diamonds as imperial objects and symbols of rule are thus gendered as female
as they are the stand-in for a female space. They furthermore enforce the view of
the colonised as effeminate as they are associated with the luxury and decadence
which the diamond suggests.
The feminisation of diamonds as objects with colonial connotations and as
plunder can be illustrated with Stevenson’s “The Rajah’s Diamond.” Sir Thomas
Vandeleur has to earn the Rajah’s Diamond: “For three years he served this semibarbarous
potentate as Jacob served Laban” (Stevenson, “Rajah’s” 130). Thomas
Vandeleur is cast into the male role of the wooer and the Indian diamond is the
reward he hopes to earn.
The gendering of the colony as female (as well as its representative, the diamond)
then leads to “[t]he geography of rape as a dominant trope for the act of