EAN: 9781408888827

KOH-I-NOOR - WILLIAM DALRYMPLE ANITA ANAND KART...

' Riveting. This highly readable and entertaining book ... finally sets the record straight on
the history of the Koh-i-Noor ' Tarquin Hall  Sunday Times  ' Dynamic  original and supremely
readable ' Maya Jasanoff  Guardian    The first comprehensive and authoritative history of the
Koh-i-Noor  arguably the most celebrated and mythologised jewel in the world.   On 29 March
1849  the ten-year-old maharaja of the Punjab was ushered into the magnificent Mirrored Hall at
the centre of the great fort in Lahore. There  in a public ceremony  the frightened but
dignified child handed over great swathes of the richest country in India in a formal Act of
Submission to a private corporation  the East India Company. He was also compelled to hand over
to the British monarch  Queen Victoria  perhaps the single most valuable object on the
subcontinent: the celebrated Koh-i-Noor diamond. The Mountain of Light.  The history of the
Koh-i-Noor may have been one woven together from gossip of Delhi bazaars  but it was to become
the accepted version. Only now is it finally challenged  freeing the diamond from the fog of
mythology that has clung to it for so long. The resulting history is one of greed  murder 
torture  colonialism and appropriation told through an impressive slice of south and central
Asian history. It ends with the jewel in its current controversial setting: in the crown of
Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother  which was deemed too contentious to be used by Camilla  the
Queen Consort  in King Charles's coronation.   Masterly  powerful and erudite  this is history
at its most compelling and invigorating.

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