Duel in the crown: Why King Charles’ coronation will be controversial

The coronation of Charles III, to be held on May 6 next year, is already mired in controversies – especially over the jewel in Queen Camilla’s crown. It is the fabulous Koh-i-Noor diamond, forcibly snatched in 1848 by the rapacious East India Company from the 10-year-old Maharaja of Lahore for presentation to Queen Victoria. It now sits among the crown jewels in the Tower of London and has been worn in the crowns of all queens consort over the last century, and by the Queen Mother at Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953.

The Koh-i-Noor diamond, seen here set in a Maltese cross on a crown made for the late Queen Mother, was taken from India during the 19th century. The British claim it was “gifted”.Credit: AP

But for many Indian citizens, it symbolises the brutality and oppression of colonialism under the British raj, and they want the diamond back. The palace and the government are reportedly hesitant to show it off for fear of demonstrations at a time when Britain needs a trade deal with India.

The coronation is constitutionally unnecessary – Charles is already King, automatically upon the Queen’s death. This ecclesiastical event merely declares him “Defender of the Faith” – the faith being that of the Anglican Church, to which, at the recent census, only 9.8 per cent of Australians say they adhere. But as a spectacle, with gold coach, trumpeting and drumming by men wearing exotic finery, the ceremony will be watched throughout the world – especially in India, where the story of the colonial heist of the Koh-i-Noor will appear disgraceful to modern ears.

This diamond, the so-called “mountain of light”, was once the largest in the world. It was mined in southern India in the 13th century but seized by Nader Shah during his sack of Delhi in 1739 and placed in the eye of the peacock atop his throne. After capture by Afghan warlords, it was retrieved by Sikh rulers of the Punjab and worn on the arm of Ranjit Singh as a symbol of his puissance. The wealth of the Punjab attracted the greedy attention of the East India Company, the commercial surrogate of the British government, which brutally invaded and forced Ranjit’s successor – the child maharaja – to sign the Treaty of Lahore, surrendering land and, by Clause III (dressed up as “reparations”), the Koh-i-Noor diamond, which “shall be surrendered to the queen of England”.

Rodney Kelly, a descendant of the Gweagal warrior Cooman whose shield was seized by the British in Botany Bay in 1770, and now sits in the British Museum.Credit: Martin Al-Ashouti

The palace still says that the diadem was a “gift”, but this is false. The boy was separated from his mother, who was thrown into prison lest she advised him to keep the jewel, and he was brainwashed into becoming a Christian (which appalled his Sikh subjects). For his “finishing school” he was transported to Windsor Castle, where Queen Victoria had already been presented with the diamond as a gift – not from the Maharaja, but from the East India Company, which had forced him to part with it as a spoil of war.

Even worse was to come. The Queen, understandably, had scruples about wearing it. So the boy had to be manipulated and pressured to “gift” it to her at a sham ceremony staged at Buckingham Palace in 1854. At age 15, after he had been satisfactorily rehearsed, the diamond was placed in his hand and he was made to present it to the Queen, who then had no compunction about wearing it.

But the circumstances, both of its taking as a spoil of an unjust war, and of its forced “gift” by a teenager deprived of his mother, were unconscionable. If repeated today, any decent equity court would set it aside.

The Koh-i-Noor is now merely the 19th-largest diamond in the world – it was cut down to look brighter in the Queen’s crown after its first display, at the Great Exhibition in 1851, failed to dazzle the crowds. Tourists can now see it among the crown jewels in the Tower, where its provenance is dishonestly described. There is a notice claiming that it is in the Queen’s crown because of the superstition that it is unlucky when worn by men (demonstrably untrue because both Nader Shah and Ranjit Singh wore it for good luck in battles they invariably won).

For India today, the Koh-i-Noor is symbolic of British colonial despoliation and suffering. Other countries have made claims – Iran through its appearance on the peacock throne, Pakistan, which has part of the Punjab, and even the Taliban, which brazenly demanded its return in 2000, when they were first in power. But it belongs to India, from which it was seized by force and “gifted” to the Queen in unconscionable circumstances.

There may be a compromise. The King wishes to be seen as a “defender of all faiths”: he could give earnest of that wish, in respect of the Sikh faith, by promising to return it, for public display in the Indian parliament building, after his consort wears it in her coronation crown.

The palace would, in that event, show the way forward to a government besieged by claims for restitution of cultural heritage wrongly taken from other countries – the Parthenon marbles, the Benin Bronzes, and of course, the Gweagal shield in the British Museum (dropped at Botany Bay after Cook shot at Indigenous Australians). Restitution of wrongfully taken cultural property cannot reverse the wrongs of the past, but it can ensure that the truth about those wrongs is eventually told.

Geoffrey Robertson KC is author of Who Owns History? Elgin’s Loot and the Case for Returning Plundered Treasure (Vintage).

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