Koh-i-Noor Page 9

  The setting being completed, Ranjit Singh fixed the Koh-i-Noor in the front of his turban, mounted his Elephant, and accompanied by Sirdars and attendants, paraded several times up and down the principal streets of the City, in order that his subjects might see the Koh-i-Noor in his possession. The Koh-i-Noor was produced and worn by Ranjit Singh as an armlet on the Diwali, the Dusserah, and other great festivals, and it was always exhibited to visitors of distinction, especially to British Officers who visited his Court. Ranjit Singh took the Koh-i-Noor with him wherever he travelled to Multan, Peshawar and other places.3

  Shortly after this, Ranjit returned to the diamond’s old owners to try, yet again, to get an estimate of its real worth. Wa’fa Begum told him, ‘If a strong man were to throw four stones, one to each of the cardinal points, North, South, East and West, and a fifth stone vertically, and if the space between were to be filled with gold and precious stones, they would not equal in value the Koh-i-Noor.’ Meanwhile Shah Shuja, when asked the same question, is said to have replied, ‘Good luck, for he who has possessed it, has obtained it by overpowering his enemies.’4

  For the rest of his life, Ranjit Singh remained anxious that his precious jewel would be stolen. He was especially worried that, ‘having partaken freely of his favourite and most potent beverage, as he was wont to do on occasions of great rejoicing, and feeling that his senses were fast yielding to its intoxicating effects, he evinced considerable anxiety for the safety of the Koh-i-Noor; for on a former occasion, when he had been indulging freely in like manner, a valuable jewel had been stolen from him’.5

  When it was not being worn, therefore he had the gem hidden away in his high-security state treasury at the impregnable fortress of Gobindgarh, and he evolved an elaborate security regime for moving it from place to place. Forty camels with identical panniers would be assembled and great secrecy was maintained as to which was actually carrying the diamond, although invariably it would actually be placed in the first, immediately behind the guards. At other times the stone would be kept under a strong guard in the Gobindgarh treasury, or toshakhana.6

  All the while, Ranjit Singh’s state continued to prosper and expand. The maharaja took full advantage of the opportunity presented by the Afghan civil war to absorb almost all of the lands of the Durrani Empire between the Indus and the Khyber Pass, conquering Peshawar in 1818, and Kashmir a year later. At the same time he built a remarkably rich, strong, centralised and tightly governed Sikh state in its place, treating defeated chiefs with great generosity and absorbing them into his political system. As well as creating his remarkable army, Ranjit also modernised his bureaucracy, balanced his revenues, evolved an enlightened agrarian policy and ran a formidable intelligence network.

  At its peak, his kingdom of Punjab and its province of Kashmir formed a unit with around thirteen million inhabitants, and Ranjit Singh seems to have been personally hugely popular: he made himself accessible to the humblest petitioner, generally respected the beliefs of non-Sikhs, visiting Muslim Sufi shrines and celebrating Hindu festivals, and was respected for his personal leniency and hatred of bloodshed – something that was observed by many visitors at court, and that dramatically distinguished him from most of his Mughal, Persian and Durrani predecessors. As Emily Eden, the sister of the British governor general Lord Auckland, conceded: ‘He is a very drunken old profligate, neither more nor less. Still he has made himself a great king; he has conquered a great many powerful enemies; he is remarkably just in his government; he has disciplined a large army; he hardly ever takes away life, which is wonderful in a despot; and he is excessively beloved by his people.’7

  Emily Eden was not alone in her admiration of Ranjit Singh. The British generally got on well with him, but they never forgot that his army was the last military force in India which could take on the Company on the field of battle: by the 1830s, the Company had stationed nearly half the Bengal army, totalling more than 39,000 troops, along the Punjab frontier.8

  The French traveller Victor Jacquemont penned a revealing portrait of the maharaja at this time. Like Emily Eden, he depicted Ranjit Singh as a wily, clever and charming old rogue – as disreputable in his private habits as he was admirable in his public virtues. ‘Ranjit Singh is an old fox,’ he wrote, ‘compared with whom the wiliest of our diplomats is a mere innocent.’ Jacquemont records several of his encounters with the maharaja. ‘His conversation is a nightmare,’ he wrote. ‘He is almost the first inquisitive Indian I have seen, but his curiosity makes up for the apathy of the whole nation. He asked me a hundred thousand questions about India, the English, Europe, Bonaparte, the world in general and the other one, hell and paradise, the soul, God, the devil, and a thousand things besides.’ Ranjit Singh regretted above all that ‘women no longer give him any more pleasure than the flowers in his garden’.

  To show me what good reason he had for his distress, yesterday in the midst of his whole court – that is to say in the open country, on a beautiful Persian carpet where we were squatting surrounded by a few thousand soldiers – lo and behold, the old roué sent for five young girls from his seraglio, ordered them to sit down in front of me, and smilingly asked what I thought of them. I said in all sincerity that I thought them very pretty, which was not a tenth what I really thought …

  But this model king is no saint: far from it. He cares nothing for law or good faith; but he is not cruel. He orders great criminals to have their noses or ears cut off, or a hand, but he never takes a life. He is extremely brave, and though he has been successful in his military campaigns, it has been by treaties and cunning negotiations that he has made himself absolute king of Punjab and Kashmir. He is also a shameless rogue who flaunts his vices as Henri III did in our country … Ranjit has frequently exhibited himself to his good people of Lahore with a Moslem public woman, indulging in the least innocent of sports with her on the back of an elephant.

  A little later, the British traveller and spy Alexander Burnes arrived in Lahore and was just as taken with Ranjit Singh as Jacquemont had been; indeed the two quickly became firm friends. ‘Nothing could exceed the affability of the Maharaja,’ Burnes wrote. ‘He kept up an uninterrupted flow of conversation for the hour and a half which the interview lasted.’ Ranjit laid on a round of entertainments for him. Dancing girls performed, deer were hunted, monuments visited and banquets thrown. Burnes even tried some of Ranjit’s home-made hell-brew, a fiery distillation of raw spirit, crushed pearls, musk, opium, gravy and spices, two glasses of which was normally enough to knock out the most hardened British drinker, but which Ranjit recommended to Burnes as a cure for his dysentery. Burnes and Ranjit, the Scot and the Sikh, found themselves bonding over a shared taste for firewater. ‘Runjeet Singh is, in every respect, an extraordinary character,’ wrote Burnes. ‘I have heard his French officers observe that he has no equal from Constantinople to India.’9

  At their final dinner, Ranjit agreed to show Burnes the Koh-i-Noor: ‘Nothing’, wrote Burnes, ‘can be imagined more superb than this stone; it is of the finest water, about half the size of an egg. Its weight amounts to 3½ rupees, and if such a jewel is to be valued, I am informed it is worth 3½ millions of money.’10

  It was after Burnes’s departure, on 17 August 1835, that Ranjit had his first major stroke. This left him partially paralysed in his face and right side; he could not speak for many hours. According to the doctor who attended him:

  The Maharaja retired to rest in a chamber where his body was freely exposed to a free circulation of air, the body being at this time in a rather profuse state of perspiration.

  In the middle of the night, he woke suddenly and found himself unable to move his tongue so as to articulate and his mouth distorted to a considerable degree. His attendants were alarmed at these symptoms and various recipes were prescribed by [his personal physician] Fakeer Azizuddin. By the end of these the Maharaja was able to articulate a little. His health likewise suffered a visible change. There was a loss of appetite, some heaviness in th
e head, heat on the palms of the hands and soles of the feet; thirst, frequently urgent, a general despondency and depression of the spirits.11

  The German traveller Baron Hügel, who met Ranjit Singh in 1836, left an impression in his writings of a man now bowed down by disease, whose speech was so badly affected by his stroke that he was almost impossible to understand. He told the traveller, ‘I begin to feel old. I am quite exhausted now.’ A second stroke followed in 1837, paralysing his right side for six months, and forcing him to communicate through signs. Fakeer Azizuddin became an expert in interpreting and understanding his sovereign’s stammering. He would put his ear close to Ranjit’s mouth and if he understood would say, ‘Eysh, eysh.’ If he failed to understand, he would shake his head and murmur, ‘Nami fahman’ – I do not understand.12

  The manoeuvres of the Great Game – that strategic, economic and political rivalry between Britain and Russia that had been growing more acute for two decades – continued throughout the late 1830s, with Burnes playing a leading role in first stoking and then moderating British fears of a Russian invasion of Afghanistan. By 1838, in response to further rumours of a Russian advance, the East India Company put into action an ambitious plan for the invasion of Afghanistan, a country which did not share a border with its territories. The Company’s new governor general, Lord Auckland, therefore opened negotiations with Ranjit Singh, trying to draw him into ever closer alliance and to lure him into participating in a joint Anglo-Sikh invasion up the Khyber – something Ranjit publicly applauded, while privately dragging his feet: the last thing he wanted was the Company encircling his territories to the north as well as to the east of his kingdom, yet he did not wish to come into conflict with his British allies and so could not publicly oppose the Company’s plans.

  In May 1838, Captain William Osborne arrived in Lahore on an East India Company official mission on behalf of his uncle, Lord Auckland, intending to change the maharaja’s mind. Ranjit Singh received his British visitors, sitting:

  [c]‌ross-legged in a golden chair, dressed in simple white, wearing no ornaments but a single string of enormous pearls round the waist, and the celebrated Koh-i-Noor, on his arm – the jewel rivalled, if not surpassed, in brilliancy by the glance of fire which every now and then shot from his single eye as it wandered restlessly round the circle … His chiefs all squatted around his chair, with the exception of Dheean Singh [his vizier] who remained standing behind his master. Though far removed from being handsome himself, Ranjit appears to take pride in being surrounded by good-looking people, and I believe few, if any other courts either in Europe or the East, could shew such a fine looking set of men as the principal Sikh sardars [noblemen].

  As for the jewel itself, Osbourne judged it to be ‘a most magnificent diamond, about an inch and a half in length, and upwards of an inch in width, and stands out from the setting about half an inch. It is in the shape of an egg … It is valued at three millions sterling, is very brilliant, and without a flaw of any kind.’

  Osbourne, like many other visitors before him, was amazed by Ranjit Singh’s restlessly inquisitive mind – despite his strokes, his mind remained as active and curious as ever. He wrote:

  As soon as we were seated, our time was principally occupied in answering Runjeet’s innumerable questions, but without the slightest chance of satisfying his curiosity.

  It is hardly possible to give an idea of the ceaseless rapidity with which his questions flow, or the infinite variety they embrace: ‘Do you drink wine?’ ‘How much?’ ‘Did you taste the wine which I sent you yesterday?’ ‘How much of it did you drink?’ ‘What artillery have you brought with you?’ ‘Have they got any shells?’ ‘How many?’ ‘Do you like riding on horseback?’ ‘What country horses do you prefer?’ ‘Are you in the army?’ ‘What do you like best, cavalry or infantry?’ ‘Does Lord Auckland drink wine?’ ‘How many glasses?’ ‘Does he drink it in the morning?’ ‘What is the strength of the Company’s army?’ ‘Are they well disciplined?’

  Such banter, he realised, was partly a smokescreen to disarm his interlocutor and disguise from them the acute political intelligence Ranjit always displayed in negotiation.

  Seven months later, in December 1838, there followed a state visit by Lord Auckland. This marked the beginning of the first British invasion of Afghanistan with joint manoeuvres being enacted on the fields of Ferozepur by British and Sikh armies, bookended by a series of ceremonial levees and dinners. But the strain of the events began to show on the now ill and elderly Ranjit Singh: on 21 December, when the governor general’s family visited Lahore shortly after the army had set off towards Afghanistan, ‘the entertainments were on a scale of princely magnificence … Runjeet insisted that his Lordship should take part in drinking, requiring each time that he should drain to the dregs a cup of fiery liquid he presented. The excesses committed by the Maharaja on this occasion produced a severe fit of apoplexy, and when Lord Auckland took leave of him, he was lying in his couch, scarcely able to articulate. But it is said that when his Lordship presented his host with a valuable jewel, his eye lighted up with all its wonted fire.’13

  In this state Ranjit Singh was visited by the governor general’s doctor, who reported back on the surprising austerity of Ranjit’s personal living quarters. These consisted only of ‘a little glass closet in a corner of his palace with a common charpoy to lie on, and no other furniture whatever, and hardly room for any’. From there Ranjit sent the Koh-i-Noor to entertain the governor general’s sisters since he was too sick to do so himself. ‘It is very large,’ wrote Emily Eden, ‘but not very bright.’ Before they left, Emily reported a last, sad sighting of the great maharaja: ‘He looked quite exhausted, almost dying.’14

  Emily was right. Ranjit Singh was indeed nearing his end. He was eventually struck down by a third major stroke, in June 1839, and it became increasingly clear to everyone that he was not going to live much longer. Haunted by the imminence of death, Ranjit began to give away his most valuable possessions. He paid a last pilgrimage to Amritsar and donated large sums to religious charities: cows with gilded horns, golden rings, satin dresses and elephants with gold howdahs.15 He then assembled all his senior officers and made them take an oath of allegiance to Kharak Singh, his eldest son.

  As his health continued to worsen, a flood of other donations followed to religious institutions of different faiths: more cows with gilded horns, golden chairs and bedsteads, strings of pearls, swords and shields, a hundred caparisoned horses and hundreds of jewelled saddles – cumulatively worth a sum calculated by the newswriter at Ranjit’s court to be around two crore rupees. It was at this stage, on 26 June, when Ranjit could only gesticulate but not speak, and as he was clearly beginning to fade away, that a major argument broke out around his deathbed as to the fate of his great diamond.

  Ranjit Singh’s head Brahmin, Bhai Gobind Ram, said that Ranjit had stated that ‘The Koh-i-Noor had always been given away by the old kings and that none of the Sultans had taken it along with himself.’ Apparently supported by the gestures of the mute, dying monarch, the Brahmin insisted that Ranjit had intended his jewels to go to the temple of Lord Jagannath in Puri, and that it should now be given away, just as he was now giving away his favourite pearls and horses.16 But Ranjit Singh’s chief treasurer, Misr Beli Ram, was equally insistent that the Koh-i-Noor belonged not personally to Ranjit but to the Sikh state, and should therefore go to Ranjit’s heir, Kharak Singh. According to his court chronicle, the Umdat ul-Tawarikh, ‘By a sign the Sarkar [Ranjit] pointed out that offerings should be made, and the stone should be sent over to Jagannathji.’

  Kharak Singh was then ordered to fetch the great diamond; he in turn stated that the diamond was with the treasurer, Misr Beli Ram.

  After that Jamdar Khushal Singh spoke to Misr Beli Ram, for its presentation; but he began to put forward excuses, and replied that the gem was in Amritsar. After that the Jamdar [head of court protocol] also said that all the property, all the wealth and all th
e material belonged to Kharak Singh. The Sarkar [Ranjit] produced wrinkles [of disapproval] on his forehead as he heard this discussion. After that, two armlets with diamonds, worth Rs 2 lakhs, several bejewelled ornaments, 8 top hats of the Persian style, 2 elephants with gold howdahs and Rs 5 lakh in cash were given away as temple offerings. The Sarkar put on all the ornaments and then removed them from every limb of his body and, making prostration by resting his head upon the earth, gave them away with the remark that it was his final wearing.17

  He then had passages from the Granth Sahib read to him and bowed deeply to the holy book, before washing himself with Ganges water. His final act, that of a dying soldier, was to give away his weapons. The following day, 27 June, it was clear that the end was very close.

  The Sarkar’s lips stopped and strength in his body became suspended and his pulse left altogether its normal course. Fakir Raza said with his eyes full of tears and his heart full of anxiety, that he knew this was the last hour. All began to weep and cry … Bhai Gobind Ram, the Brahmin, said into the ear of the Sarkar, at the moment he was expiring, the words, ‘Ram, Ram,’ three times. The Sarkar repeated them twice, but at the third time, his lips did not open and his life went out of him. Up to the time of his expiring, his eyes had been fixed upon the picture of Laxmi and Vishnu. When the day had passed three quarters and three hours he bade farewell to this mortal world and got transferred to this everlasting universe. Kharak Singh and others began to weep and cry …