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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