indichawla
SPNer
- Sep 20, 2025
- 17
- 2
- 63
Abstract
This essay argues that the Koh-i-noor diamond is stolen property and the rightful Koh-i-noor
belongs to the Sikh community from where it was stolen in 1849. It follows the diamond’s journey from
the mines in the Deccan to the hands of the Mughals, Persians, Afghans and finally, the Sikhs. It documents
Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s specific bequest of the diamond to the Jagannath Temple in Puri and the deliberate
violation of his will by the British East India Company. It reveals the charade of 1854 at Osborne House,
when a young boy, an orphan, a forcibly converted Sikh, and isolated from his mother, was psychologically
manipulated and forced to perform a “gift” of his own stolen inheritance to Queen Victoria. The essay
makes a direct comparison between colonial loot and looted art in the Holocaust era and suggests the
Washington Principles, which underpin restitution for Holocaust era art, as a blueprint for the return of the
Koh-i-noor. It rejects the notion of the British dependence on the 1849 Treaty of Lahore, a legal fiction
founded on it being signed by a ten-year-old under duress conditions. The conclusion is unambiguous, the
diamond must be leave the Tower of London and be placed in the custody of the Sikh institutions that
represent the continuity of the kingdom from which it was stolen.
Inderjeet Singh Chawla
The Mountain of Light: Empire, Theft, and the Unfinished Reckoning
©inderjeetsinghchawla2026 – inderjeetchawla@gmail.com
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood before the press on a crisp spring afternoon in
2026, and he said something that sent a tremor through the transatlantic establishment. King Charles III
was due in New York on a state visit. A reporter asked Mamdani what he would discuss with the British
monarch. He did not answer with diplomatic pleasantries. He answered with the Koh-i-noor. “If I were to
speak to the king,” Mamdani said, “I would probably request and encourage him to return the Koh-i-noor
diamond to the rightful owner.” The remark was neither accidental nor improvised. Mamdani is the son of
Mahmood Mamdani, the renowned scholar of colonialism, and Mira Nair, the Indian-born filmmaker.
When he spoke of the diamond, he spoke from a lineage that has spent decades documenting and
dramatising what the empire did to the people it subjugated. The diamond, in his phrasing, was a “pocketsized
symbol of colonial loot.”1
The reaction from both sides of the Atlantic demonstrated the raw nerve the Koh-i-noor still
touches. The New York Post quickly condemned the mayor for his lack of “maturity, grace and humility.”
Reform UK politicians called it an “insult to our King.” But in the rest of India, Mamdani’s utterance was
welcomed. The internet was ablaze. The social media lit up. Radio and television stations aired stories. The
diamond, locked up in a glass case in the Tower of London, had once more had a peculiar power to unsettle
the present. This essay is based on a very basic premise. The Koh-i-noor diamond is a stolen property taken
fraudulently from its rightful owner. It was not gifted. The exchange didn’t happen through the legal
process. It was stolen, by force and fraud, from a conquered people, and its present place in the British
Crown Jewels represents the continuing act of dishonesty. The rightful place of the diamond is with the
Sikh community, from whom it was taken. This is not a new development; there is a legal framework for
the return of the diamond. It has been used in the world before.
Any honest account of the Koh-i-noor must begin with the stone itself. Not the mythology, nor
the romance. The geology. The diamond came out of the earth in the Golconda region of what is now the
states of the Indian Union, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The Kollur mine, specifically. 2 The land from
where it was extracted belonged then to the Kakatiya dynasty, a Telugu-speaking kingdom that ruled from
the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. The stone that would become the Koh-i-noor was almost certainly
mined during their reign. It was, at that point, a massive uncut diamond, likely weighing somewhere near
793 carats in its rough form.3 No larger diamond had ever been found in India. Few larger diamonds have
ever been found anywhere. The Kakatiyas did not hold the stone for long. In the early 14th century,
Alauddin Khilji, the second sultan of the Delhi sultanate, sent his armies to conquest south of India. In
1310 AD, his general. Malik Kafur campaigned against the Kakatiya kingdom, extracting vast tribute.4 Part
of the tribute was the diamond, which was sent to Delhi and became part of the Khilji treasury. It was the
first of many transfers of the stone, not by trade, gift, but through military conquest. The course was set
from early on. The Koh-i-noor moved around as the armies moved and came into possession of whoever
had the sharpest sword. The Khiljis passed the stone to the Tughlaqs, and then to the Sayyids and finally
to the Lodis. The Mughal empire was founded in 1526 after Babur’s victory over Ibrahim Lodi in the First
Battle of Panipat. The diamond entered the treasury of the Mughals. The Pea{censored} Throne was
commissioned by Babur's descendant, Shah Jahan, the builder of the Taj Mahal, in the early 17th century.
The throne was an object of incredible luxury, gold, enamel, and precious stones covering the entire surface,
and its crown sat the Koh-i-noor. The stone now symbolised the Mughal authority and sovereignty, the
physical manifestation of an empire’s claim to universal dominion. Nadir Shah (Persian warlord) attacked
the weakened Mughal Empire in 1739. He sacked Delhi, massacred thousands of its people and took the
Pea{censored} Throne to Iran. According to legend, it was Nadir Shah who, on spotting the great diamond, said:
1 Pocket-sized symbol of colonial loot: how New York's mayor revived Koh-i-noor diamond debate, The Guardian, May 5, 2026.
2 From Golconda to London, the journey of Kohinoor diamond, Indian Express, April 18, 2016; From Golconda to Kandahar to
London: The Journey of the Fabled Kohinoor Diamond, The Better India, August 8, 2016.
3 Koh-i-Noor to Hope: 5 of the Most Expensive Diamonds in the World, India Today, April 18, 2016.
4 A Diamond to Die For: The Bloody History of the Koh-i-Noor, The Daily Telegraph, June 11, 2017.
Inderjeet Singh Chawla
The Mountain of Light: Empire, Theft, and the Unfinished Reckoning
©inderjeetsinghchawla2026 – inderjeetchawla@gmail.com
“Koh-i-noor” (Mountain of Light, in Persian). The name stuck. The stone now had its own name that
would survive any empires that possessed it.
In 1747, Nadir Shah was assassinated. With his death, the empire fractured. The diamond came
into the hands of his grandson, Shah Rukh, and then to Ahmad Shah Durrani, the first Afghan ruler. The
Durrani dynasty held the throne through decades of internal strife and civil war. By the early 19th century,
a fugitive Durrani prince named Shah Shuja, who took refuge in Lahore, was left to the mercy of the
growing power in Punjab. Maharaja Ranjit Singh had built something remarkable. He was born in 1780 and
had lost one of his eyes to smallpox as a child. By the age of 21, he had already unified the warring Sikh
Misls (confederacies), which had divided Punjab since the decline of the Mughal empire and its authority.
Maharaja Ranjit Singh established himself as the undisputed sovereign of the Sikh Empire. His Empire
extended from the Khyber Pass to the Sutlej River and from Kashmir to the desert of Sindh. By this time,
the British East India Company had subjugated much of the Indian subcontinent and treated the Sikh
Empire with wary respect. The only ruler to whom they could not be bullied was Maharaja Ranjit Singh.
Ranjit Singh knew the value of all power. He modernised his army with European officers and artillery. He
established a sophisticated administration. He assembled one of the great collections of the 19th century.
Lahore, Toshakhana was the royal treasury where gold, jewels, weapons, textiles and sacred relics were
stored.5 The Governor General Lord Auckland’s sister, Fanny Eden, visited Lahore in 18386 and recorded
that the Maharaja had jewels in abundance and decorated his horses with the finest gems. Then she wrote
something more revealing: “Should we ever be permitted to plunder this kingdom, I would go directly to
their stables.” The British knew exactly what they were looking for
The Koh-i-noor came into Ranjit Singh’s possession through Shah Shuja. The stone had been
brought to Lahore in seeking sanctuary by the deposed Afghan king. Ranjit Singh gave him protection, but
he demanded the diamond in return. The negotiation was protracted and coercive. The family of Shah
Shuja had been virtually captured. In 1813, the deal was done. Koh-i-noor was transferred into the hands
of the Sikh Empire. Maharaja Ranjit Singh wore the diamond on his arm during the durbar assemblies. It
was a statement. The stone, which had previously been used to adorn the mighty Mughal emperors and
crowned the Pea{censored} Throne, rested on the bicep of a one-eyed Sikh king, who had come from the chaos
of the eighteenth century and established the last independent kingdom of the subcontinent. The
symbolism was well-intended and intentional.
The question and matters for the argument of this essay is, what did Maharaja Ranjit Singh do?
Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s death unleashed chaos, which the British had been patiently waiting for to erupt.
His eldest legal son, Kharak Singh, ascended to the throne but was regarded as incompetent. He died in a
matter of 16-17 months, possibly by poisoning. On the day of his father’s cremation, Nau Nihal Singh, his
son, was killed by a falling archway. It was rumoured that it was an assassination. The result was the same.
Subsequently, the Sikh Empire came under the control of Sher Singh, another son of Maharaj Ranjit Singh,
who was himself assassinated in 1843. Post Sher Singh’s death, the throne of the Punjab sat under the fiveyear-
old Duleep Singh. His mother, Rani Jind Kaur, as regent. A formidable woman, the British in their
dispatches referred to her as “the Messalina of the Punjab,” a reference to Messalina, the notorious wife of
the Roman Emperor Claudius, deploying the standard colonial tactic of sexual slander against women who
5 Plunder of Lahore Toshakhana, SikhNet, October 9, 2023; The Toshakhana and the Curious Case of the Missing Koh-e-Noor
Diamond, The Friday Times, March 17, 2023.
6Emily Eden, Up the Country: Letters Written to Her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India (London: Richard Bentley,
1866). Both Emily Eden and her sister Fanny accompanied their brother, Governor General Lord Auckland, to
India in 1838. Emily Eden’s published account is the more widely cited source; the quotation attributed to Fanny in
the essay is drawn from her diary as recorded by Fanny herself.
Inderjeet Singh Chawla
The Mountain of Light: Empire, Theft, and the Unfinished Reckoning
©inderjeetsinghchawla2026 – inderjeetchawla@gmail.com
resisted them. Jind Kaur attempted to hold the kingdom together. She failed. The British were too strong,
too patient, and too ruthless.
In 1845, the First Anglo-Sikh War broke out. The British emerged victorious, but at a staggering
cost. The Sikh army had received training from the European officers. It was the ferocity of their soldiers
that left the Company generals shocked.. In 1846, the Treaty of Lahore was signed, which imposed harsh
conditions of diminishing the Sikh Empire, ceding territory, reducing the army, and permanently installing
a British officer in Lahore. However, the Punjab remained nominally independent. The Koh-i-noor
remained in the Toshakhana. The British wanted the kingdom and the diamond. The pretext came from
the Second Anglo-Sikh War (1848-1849). After the war, Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General, acted with
surgical precision, with victory on his side. He dispatched his Secretary, Sir Henry Elliott, to Lahore with
specific instructions. Now ten years old, Duleep Singh was to sign a new treaty. The agreement would give
the British the whole of Punjab. It would also have a particular clause relating to the diamond.
Article III of the Treaty of Lahore, 1849, reads “The gem called the Koh-i-Noor, which was taken
from Shah Sooja-ool-moolk by Maharajah Ranjit Singh, shall be surrendered by the Maharajah of Lahore
to the Queen of England. Each of the clauses should be considered. The verb “surrendered” is not
ambiguous. It is not the language of a giveaway or a gift. It’s the language of surrender. A 10-year-old child
does not surrender anything that is too voluntarily. He signs at the bottom line what the men with guns tell
him to sign. This was perfectly understood at Dalhousie. He had determined that the troublesome nature
of Punjabi independence would not stand in the way of British imperial ambitions. The diamond was treated
separately from the rest of Lahore Toshkhana, precisely because its symbolic value exceeded even its
staggering monetary value. The treaty was not a legal agreement between equals; it was the codification of
conquest. Subsequent positions have been taken by the British government, which claimed the diamond
was acquired lawfully. In a shameful submission before the Supreme Court in 2016, the Solicitor General
of India even claimed that the diamond was “voluntarily given” by Ranjit Singh to the British.7 This was
false on two counts. Ranjit Singh had been dead for a decade. The diamond wasn’t given. It was taken.
The diamond arrived in England in 1850. Lord Dalhousie personally carried it. He presented it to
Queen Victoria not as a gift from the Maharaja of Punjab, that fiction had not yet been fully constructed,
but as a spoil of war. The official record shows that the Governor-General of India presented the diamond
to his sovereign on behalf of the East India Company, which had seized it from the conquered Sikh
kingdom. However, “spoils of war” was an ambiguous term for the British. The 19th century was the era of
humanitarian sentiment. The British public believed in their empire as a civilising force rather than a
kleptocracy. A child king who had to give up his birthright was not the right character of the story. So the
British made up a story.
Duleep Singh was brought to England in 1854, having lost his kingdom at a tender age of eleven.
At the time of his arrival at the court of the queen, who now possessed his diamond he was, Duleep was
15 years old. In the intervening years, the British had worked systematically to remake him. His mother had
been separated from him, imprisoned and exiled to Nepal. He was placed under the guardianship of Dr
John Spencer Login, a British officer appointed to be the keeper of the Sikh Empire’s Toshakhana and who
had taken inventory of the treasures looted by the British. The boy's de facto governess became Login's
wife, Lena. Duleep Singh was baptised as a Christian. English was taught to him. He was dressed in British
attire. In the words of one historian, he was “determinedly absorbed and remodelled by the Victorian
court.”8
The events that followed were orchestrated like a stage play. Duleep Singh was invited to Osborne
House, Queen Victoria’s home on the Isle of Wight. She had learnt that Lady Login that the subject of the
Koh-i-noor was painful for the young Maharaja. The queen asked him whether he had ever talked about it
or felt regret over its loss. Lady Login confirmed that he did. Victoria decided to proceed anyway.
7 All India Human Rights and Social Justice Front v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 185/2016 (Supreme Court of
India, April 18, 2016). During this hearing, Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar stated that the Koh-i-Noor was
“voluntarily given” to the British by the successors of Maharaja Ranjit Singh as compensation for help in the Sikh
Wars. This submission drew widespread criticism as it appeared to ignore the coercive circumstances of the 1849
Treaty of Lahore, signed by the ten-year-old Maharaja Duleep Singh.
8 How Duleep Singh ‘Handed’ It to the Queen,’ Tribune, April 21, 2016.
Inderjeet Singh Chawla
The Mountain of Light: Empire, Theft, and the Unfinished Reckoning
©inderjeetsinghchawla2026 – inderjeetchawla@gmail.com
Queen Victoria set up a private audience. She took the recut diamond from its box and placed it
in Duleep Singh's hand. Lady Login was present, who recorded the scene in her memoirs.9 The Maharaja
held the diamond in his hand and held it up to the sun. His face showed what Lena described in her
memoirs, “a passion of repressed emotion,” as the room grew tense. Lady Login wrote that she was afraid
he would "in a fit of madness throw out the precious talisman of the open window.” Then the British would
immediately weaponise what Duleep Singh had done. He walked to the queen, bowed and returned the
diamond to her hands. “It is to me, Ma’am, the greatest pleasure thus to have the opportunity, as a loyal
subject, of myself tendering to my Sovereign, the Koh-i-Noor.
The British narrative has treated this moment as a voluntary gift ever since. Now a devoted subject
of the empire and a Christian gentleman, the Maharaja gave his diamond to his queen. The Treaty of Lahore
disappeared from the story. The stolen diamond became a freely given token of affection. It's where the
“gift” story took its roots, from which the British Government continues to use. The reality is clear as
crystal. A teenage boy, stripped of his kingdom, separated from his family, especially his mother, that too
at a very tender age, forcibly converted, surrounded by the subjects of a colonial power that destroyed his
family, plundered his inheritance and nation and handed over his stolen property by the woman who did
not possess it. He knew and understood the script he had been trained for it for years to perform it and
then spent the rest of his life regretting it. Duleep Singh later called Queen Victoria “Mrs Fagin,”,invoking
the notorious fence in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and applying the name with bitter irony to the queen,
casting her as the receiver of his stolen inheritance. He attempted to reclaim the lost empire and even
attempted to return to Sikhism. He ended up a broken man and died in 1893 in a Paris hotel, impoverished
and embittered, a man who had spent his entire adult life trying to undo the performance of his adolescence.
The diamond stayed in the possession of the British. The charade at Osborne House in 1854 was not an
act of generosity It was a psychological coercion dressed in the costumes of ceremony. The 15-year-old
Maharaja did not donate. He was being held hostage and acting out a script devised by his captors. This
was known to the British Crown at the time. It knows this now. For one hundred and seventy years, it has
chosen to maintain the fiction
The diamond had been recut in 1852. The pre-cut Mughal stone was originally 186 carats. Its
brilliance was not up to the British taste, and they used the services of a Dutch cutter who spent 38 days
reducing it to 105.6 carats. The cutting was highly controversial, even in its time. The process was personally
supervised by Prince Albert. The result was a diamond of greater sparkle but diminished mass, a metaphor
for what empires do to the objects it acquires: it reshapes them for the metropolitan tastes and call the
result improved.
The Koh-i-noor now sits within the guarded domain of the Tower of London, with multiple parties
claiming ownership. India asserts ownership based on the diamond’s geographic origin and its long history
within the subcontinent. Pakistan claims it because the Sikh Empire’s capital, Lahore, lies within Pakistan’s
borders. Afghanistan claims it through the Durrani dynasty, which held the stone before Ranjit Singh. Iran
has at times advanced claims based on Nadir Shah's conquest. Even the Jagannath Temple in Puri has a
documented claim through Maharaja Ranjit Singh's will.10 While the British government skilfully makes use
of these conflicting claims, the argument runs: since the previous owners of the diamond cannot come to
a consensus on who is entitled to it, the British can hold it as neutral custodians. The multiplicity of claims
becomes a justification for inaction. The colonial power presents its own intransigence as a solution to a
problem it created. This line of reasoning is sophistical. The moral principle gets confused by a practical
obstacle. Multiple claimants don’t absolve the present possessor of the obligation and responsibility to
return the stolen property. It merely complicates the logistics of return. The complication is real, but it is
not dispositive. The strongest claim comes from the Sikh community, more specifically, those who are
9Lena Login, Sir John Login and Duleep Singh (London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1890). Lady Login’s memoir is the primary
eyewitness account of the July 1854 Osborne House encounter.
10Bring Back Kohinoor Diamond, Gift It to Jagannath Temple: BJD MP, Zee News, May 3, 2016; Odisha Body
Claims Kohinoor Belongs to Lord Jagannath, Seeks Its Return from UK, Tribune, September 13, 2022.
Inderjeet Singh Chawla
The Mountain of Light: Empire, Theft, and the Unfinished Reckoning
©inderjeetsinghchawla2026 – inderjeetchawla@gmail.com
descendants of the Sikh Empire, from which the diamond was forcibly taken. This is based on three pillars:
the conditions for taking, the victim’s specific identity, and the legal principle that property can be recovered
only from the party from whom it was stolen, not from a prior owner further up in the chain of provenance.
The Koh-i-noor was taken from the Sikh Empire. It was taken from the grandson of Ranjit Singh, named
Duleep Singh. The mechanism of taking, by a treaty signed under duress by a small child, would be void
and invalid in any mature and serious legal system. The Treaty of Lahore of 1849 does not qualify as a
legitimate or valid contract. It’s a history of conquest by a colonial empire. A ten-year-old boy’s signature
extracted at the point of a gun does not transfer the title. Any first-year law student can identify this as
voidable for duress, incapacity, and unconscionability. The British government’s reliance on the treaty is
legally embarrassing and morally bankrupt.
Ranjit Singh's will complicates but does not defeat the Sikh claim. The Maharaja wanted the
diamond to be presented to the Jagannath Temple. That’s good enough, a wish to be respected. However,
the diamond never reached Jaganath Puri. Before the bequest was to be carried out, the British seized. The
Jagannath Temple has a legitimate grievance against the British for frustrating the bequest. However, the
immediate victim of the theft was the Sikh Empire, the state that held the diamond when it was seized. The
Sikh claim is not diminished by the existence of the will. In fact, the will had the effect of strengthening the
Sikh claim as it clearly demonstrates that the diamond was not just state property and could be disposed of
by any successor Government. It was under the specific instructions of its owner. The British were familiar
with those instructions. They disregarded them. The primary wrong was the dispossession of the Sikh
Empire. The secondary wrong was the frustration of the charitable bequest.
The argument for returning the diamond to the Sikh community gains force from the injury and
wrongdoing inflicted on the Sikh Empire, which was a distinct political entity. In this instance, the entity
that suffered was not India and Pakistan, the newly formed nation-states or even Afghanistan. The Sikh
Empire was a sovereign kingdom with its own dynasty, its own army and treasury. The Empire was
conquered by the English as an independent state, and the diamond taken from its treasury was Sikh
property, not the property of any other nation-state. India and Pakistan received territorial sovereignty at
the time of their independence in 1947, but they did not receive ownership rights to the items stolen by the
British from the Sikh Empire a century before independence. The Sikh community, the people whose
ancestors built the kingdom, fought the wars, and lost the diamond, retains a moral claim that transcends
the colonial-era partition of the subcontinent. This is not an argument that the diamond belongs exclusively
to Ranjit Singh's descendants. The Sikh community is not reducible to a single family dynastic line. The
arguments remain that the diamond should be returned to an independent Sikh institution, a trust or a
museum that solely represents the continuity of the community from which the diamond was taken. It’s
the principle that matters, while the practical details can be negotiated
The world has confronted this problem before. It has found solutions that were amicable. The
most instructive precedent and prime example is the restitution of artworks and cultural property looted by
the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. The Nazi regime from 1933 until 1945 carried out the biggest
program for organised theft in human history. Works of art such as paintings, sculptures, books, jewels,
and religious icons belonging to Jewish families and synagogues were seized, along with those taken from
museums and churches. This looting was systematic, bureaucratic, and ideologically motivated; it formed
part of Nazism and was not an accidental occurrence. It was central to it. The Nazis knew that stripping a
community of its cultural patrimony was part of stripping them of their humanity. Post-WWII, the Allied
powers started a slow process of restitution. This was an arduous task, and the process was imperfect. Many
of these works and artefacts remained unrecovered; many claimants had been murdered and subjected to
mass extermination. However, a legal framework for dealing emerged post the conference that was held in
Washington in 1998 on the Holocaust-era assets. This led to the formulation of the Washington Principles
on Nazi-Confiscated Art, endorsed by more than forty nations, which established that art that had been
confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently resituated should be identified.11 They called for archives to
be opened, for claims to be encouraged, and for just and fair solutions to be reached expeditiously.
The Washington Principles are not legally binding in the very strict sense. Instead, they operate on
moral suasion and public pressure. Nonetheless, it has been effective. Hundreds of artworks were restored
11Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, U.S. Department of State, December 3, 1998,
Inderjeet Singh Chawla
The Mountain of Light: Empire, Theft, and the Unfinished Reckoning
©inderjeetsinghchawla2026 – inderjeetchawla@gmail.com
to their rightful heirs. Even museum collections, which have exhibited some artwork for decades, have
surrendered them. Art auctions have been voided due to sales under duress, identified as stolen assets.
Some countries even amended their laws to make the restitution easier. The world recognised that theft
cannot become legitimate through the passage of time. The parallel to colonial plundering is precise in all
material respects. The East India Company and the Great Britain crown engaged in the same activity as the
Nazis towards the Jewish people. They identified objects of value, seized them by force, fraud and coercion,
and incorporated them in their own trophies as spoils of war and systemised looting. The British used paper
trails to conceal the theft and relied on coercive legal documents, just like the Nazis did. The British
considered cultural objects as war booty; the Nazis did likewise. The sole substantive distinction between
the two cases is the identity of the victims. The Nazis stole from the Jews. The British stole from the
colonies. The international community, dominated for centuries by the European powers, considered
crimes against Europeans to be serious and crimes against Asians to be ultimately historical. That double
standard is the unspoken premise of every British reluctance to discuss restitution. If paintings looted by
Hermann Göring from Jewish art collectors in Paris were to be returned to their rightful owners, and not
remain in museums where they’ve been held for the past eighty years, then the Koh-i-Noor should rightfully
return in the hands of the community from which it was forcibly taken, and not be locked away in the
Tower of London. The passage of one hundred and seventy years does not lessen the crime of theft; it
makes the failure to rectify it more shameful. The British establishment realises the strength of this analogy,
which is why they try so desperately to resist its use. The 1970 United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) convention that deals with the prohibition and prevention of the illicit
importing, exporting, and transfer of ownership of cultural property is not retroactive. This means that it
cannot be applied to objects that were removed before 1970. The Koh-i-noor diamond was removed in
1849. The British are pleased about such technicalities as being able to invoke a treaty drafted to preserve
their ill-got gains and serves as a moral defence. It does not. The non-retroactivity of positive law is a
technicality, not a principle. Murder was wrong before it was criminalised. Theft was immoral and wrong
before UNESCO.
The royal family of Britain has developed a well-practised technique when it comes to the issue of
dealing with the Koh-i-noor diamond controversy. It chooses not to acknowledge, nor engage. On the
occasion of Camilla’s coronation ceremony as Queen Consort to King Charles III in May 2023, the royal
family announced that she would not be wearing the crown set with the Koh-i-noor diamond.12 This
decision was seen by many as a diplomatic gesture towards India to pacify their anger regarding the
ownership of the gem. It was anything but that, but simply damage control. The palace understood that
images of a British queen wearing a diamond that was stolen would circulate globally and provoke precisely
the kind of debate that this essay represents. The solution was not to return the diamond to the rightful
owner, the solution was to keep it out of the photographs and avoid any kind of controversy. This is the
standard stance and a classic posture of an institution that has a lot of hide. There will be no debate on the
Koh-i-noor by the Crown, because the debate implies the existence of a question. The Crown’s position is
that there is no question, the diamond is the British property, lawfully acquired, and the matter stands
closed. Every refusal to either engage, every demurral, every well-worded statement of denial ‘on the advice
of ministers’, is an assertion, a declaration that power had the right to determine reality. Britain had taken
control of the diamond because it could, and Britain retains the diamond because it can. The moral
arguments are irrelevant. Might made right in 1849, and the passage of time has converted might into a
simulacrum of legality. This is not a position anyone in good standing or a serious person should take or
accept. Legitimacy isn’t dependent on time. Something wrong does not turn into something right simply
because it has been around long enough. The Kohinoor is stolen property. The Crown recognises that it is
stolen property and stoic silence is an admission it cannot afford to make aloud.
12 Camilla, Wife of Britain’s King Charles, Will Not Wear Disputed Koh-i-Noor Diamond for Coronation, Tribune,
February 15, 2023.
Inderjeet Singh Chawla
The Mountain of Light: Empire, Theft, and the Unfinished Reckoning
©inderjeetsinghchawla2026 – inderjeetchawla@gmail.com
The restitution of the Koh-i-noor will not be an easy administrative act. It will involve dealing with
the different stakeholders who each have a valid and legitimate connection to the stone. It will entail the
recognition by the British government that its predecessors were guilty of wrongdoing and that wrong
requires rectification. It will require the surrender of one of the most prized possessions of the Crown.
In the current posture taken by the British government, it becomes clear that there is no leeway
for any kind of negotiation whatsoever. With the stance taken by the British government on the legal
acquisition of the diamond and the certainty of its rightful ownership, the British government makes it
impossible to enter into the conversation demanded by the Washington Principles. This is not an issue of
honest disagreement about history, but an outright refusal to take part in the process set out by the
international community. The British argument that the multiplicity of claimants justifies indefinite British
custody is particularly offensive. It imagines the British monarchy as a neutral trustee, holding the diamond
for the benefit of the disputing parties until they can agree among themselves. But the British monarchy is
not neutral. It is one of the disputing parties. It is the party that currently possesses the diamond. It is the
party that profited from the original theft. For the Crown to present itself as an impartial custodian is like
a burglar offering to hold onto stolen goods until the victims can agree on who gets what.
Zohran Mamdani's remarks in 2026 did not create the controversy over the Koh-i-noor. They
revealed a controversy that had never been resolved. The diamond remains, as William Dalrymple has
observed, “a hugely emotional issue.” Onto this “one little stone, sitting in a glass cabinet in London, has
been projected all the pain that South Asia feels about colonialism.”13 This pain is not an abstraction. The
British Empire extracted enormous wealth from the subcontinent for over two centuries. The drain of
wealth theory put forth and attributed by Indian nationalists at the turn of the 19th century and confirmed
by modern economic historians, holds that Britain extracted trillions of pounds in today’s money from
India through taxes, trade imbalances, and outright plunder. The Koh-i-noor represents this loot. It is a
tangible manifestation of what was taken. That it remains inside the Tower of London stands as a testament
to the official reminder that what was taken has not been returned. Colonialism was not a historical episode
that ended in 1947. Colonialism was a deliberate act of exploitation, organised theft, plunder, and erasure
of culture whose consequences still structure the global distribution of wealth and power. The Koh-i-Noor
diamond is in Britain because the global order of things was built in favour of those nations that colonised
the rest of the world. The former colonies can make demands for the return of their heritage. They cannot
compel their return. The asymmetry of power that enabled the theft in 1849 continues to block restitution
in 2026. Breaking that asymmetry requires more than diplomatic requests. It requires moral pressure that
the British establishment cannot ignore. This demands that the ex-colonies and their diaspora communities
insist again and again, publicly, that the symbols of looted artefacts must be returned to the rightful owners.
This demands the likes of Zohran Mamdani to leverage their prominence and platforms in bringing
attention to the injustice, name the crime and demand its rectification. This demands that historians and
journalists document the events to such an extent that the British narrative of lawful acquisition becomes
unsustainable and falls apart.
This essay is part of that project. The facts are not in dispute. The Koh-i-noor was mined in India;
it belonged to the Kakatiyas, the Mughals, the Afsharids, the Durranis, and finally the Sikhs. Maharaja Ranjit
Singh willed it to the Jagannath Temple in Puri. Lord Dalhousie forced a ten-year-old child to sign it away
in a treaty of surrender. Queen Victoria got it as plunder. The British court coerced the teenage Duleep
Singh and forced him to perform a charade of a voluntary gift. The diamond has remained in London ever
since, having had its past rewritten to make its appropriation legitimate and the theft rebranded as a legal
acquisition.
Irrespective of all of this, the diamond must be returned. The proper recipients are the Sikh
community, represented through institutions that they chose to designate. The framework for restitution
13 William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond (London:
Bloomsbury, 2017), 261.
Inderjeet Singh Chawla
The Mountain of Light: Empire, Theft, and the Unfinished Reckoning
©inderjeetsinghchawla2026 – inderjeetchawla@gmail.com
already exists. The world used it to return Nazi loot. It can be used to return imperial loot. The only thing
missing is the political will to acknowledge that wrongs committed against brown people in the nineteenth
century are just as real as wrongs committed against white people in the twentieth. The Koh-i-noor is a
stone. It is also a test. The British Crown has been failing that test for a hundred and seventy years. It is
time to pass it.
This essay argues that the Koh-i-noor diamond is stolen property and the rightful Koh-i-noor
belongs to the Sikh community from where it was stolen in 1849. It follows the diamond’s journey from
the mines in the Deccan to the hands of the Mughals, Persians, Afghans and finally, the Sikhs. It documents
Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s specific bequest of the diamond to the Jagannath Temple in Puri and the deliberate
violation of his will by the British East India Company. It reveals the charade of 1854 at Osborne House,
when a young boy, an orphan, a forcibly converted Sikh, and isolated from his mother, was psychologically
manipulated and forced to perform a “gift” of his own stolen inheritance to Queen Victoria. The essay
makes a direct comparison between colonial loot and looted art in the Holocaust era and suggests the
Washington Principles, which underpin restitution for Holocaust era art, as a blueprint for the return of the
Koh-i-noor. It rejects the notion of the British dependence on the 1849 Treaty of Lahore, a legal fiction
founded on it being signed by a ten-year-old under duress conditions. The conclusion is unambiguous, the
diamond must be leave the Tower of London and be placed in the custody of the Sikh institutions that
represent the continuity of the kingdom from which it was stolen.
Inderjeet Singh Chawla
The Mountain of Light: Empire, Theft, and the Unfinished Reckoning
©inderjeetsinghchawla2026 – inderjeetchawla@gmail.com
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood before the press on a crisp spring afternoon in
2026, and he said something that sent a tremor through the transatlantic establishment. King Charles III
was due in New York on a state visit. A reporter asked Mamdani what he would discuss with the British
monarch. He did not answer with diplomatic pleasantries. He answered with the Koh-i-noor. “If I were to
speak to the king,” Mamdani said, “I would probably request and encourage him to return the Koh-i-noor
diamond to the rightful owner.” The remark was neither accidental nor improvised. Mamdani is the son of
Mahmood Mamdani, the renowned scholar of colonialism, and Mira Nair, the Indian-born filmmaker.
When he spoke of the diamond, he spoke from a lineage that has spent decades documenting and
dramatising what the empire did to the people it subjugated. The diamond, in his phrasing, was a “pocketsized
symbol of colonial loot.”1
The reaction from both sides of the Atlantic demonstrated the raw nerve the Koh-i-noor still
touches. The New York Post quickly condemned the mayor for his lack of “maturity, grace and humility.”
Reform UK politicians called it an “insult to our King.” But in the rest of India, Mamdani’s utterance was
welcomed. The internet was ablaze. The social media lit up. Radio and television stations aired stories. The
diamond, locked up in a glass case in the Tower of London, had once more had a peculiar power to unsettle
the present. This essay is based on a very basic premise. The Koh-i-noor diamond is a stolen property taken
fraudulently from its rightful owner. It was not gifted. The exchange didn’t happen through the legal
process. It was stolen, by force and fraud, from a conquered people, and its present place in the British
Crown Jewels represents the continuing act of dishonesty. The rightful place of the diamond is with the
Sikh community, from whom it was taken. This is not a new development; there is a legal framework for
the return of the diamond. It has been used in the world before.
Any honest account of the Koh-i-noor must begin with the stone itself. Not the mythology, nor
the romance. The geology. The diamond came out of the earth in the Golconda region of what is now the
states of the Indian Union, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The Kollur mine, specifically. 2 The land from
where it was extracted belonged then to the Kakatiya dynasty, a Telugu-speaking kingdom that ruled from
the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. The stone that would become the Koh-i-noor was almost certainly
mined during their reign. It was, at that point, a massive uncut diamond, likely weighing somewhere near
793 carats in its rough form.3 No larger diamond had ever been found in India. Few larger diamonds have
ever been found anywhere. The Kakatiyas did not hold the stone for long. In the early 14th century,
Alauddin Khilji, the second sultan of the Delhi sultanate, sent his armies to conquest south of India. In
1310 AD, his general. Malik Kafur campaigned against the Kakatiya kingdom, extracting vast tribute.4 Part
of the tribute was the diamond, which was sent to Delhi and became part of the Khilji treasury. It was the
first of many transfers of the stone, not by trade, gift, but through military conquest. The course was set
from early on. The Koh-i-noor moved around as the armies moved and came into possession of whoever
had the sharpest sword. The Khiljis passed the stone to the Tughlaqs, and then to the Sayyids and finally
to the Lodis. The Mughal empire was founded in 1526 after Babur’s victory over Ibrahim Lodi in the First
Battle of Panipat. The diamond entered the treasury of the Mughals. The Pea{censored} Throne was
commissioned by Babur's descendant, Shah Jahan, the builder of the Taj Mahal, in the early 17th century.
The throne was an object of incredible luxury, gold, enamel, and precious stones covering the entire surface,
and its crown sat the Koh-i-noor. The stone now symbolised the Mughal authority and sovereignty, the
physical manifestation of an empire’s claim to universal dominion. Nadir Shah (Persian warlord) attacked
the weakened Mughal Empire in 1739. He sacked Delhi, massacred thousands of its people and took the
Pea{censored} Throne to Iran. According to legend, it was Nadir Shah who, on spotting the great diamond, said:
1 Pocket-sized symbol of colonial loot: how New York's mayor revived Koh-i-noor diamond debate, The Guardian, May 5, 2026.
2 From Golconda to London, the journey of Kohinoor diamond, Indian Express, April 18, 2016; From Golconda to Kandahar to
London: The Journey of the Fabled Kohinoor Diamond, The Better India, August 8, 2016.
3 Koh-i-Noor to Hope: 5 of the Most Expensive Diamonds in the World, India Today, April 18, 2016.
4 A Diamond to Die For: The Bloody History of the Koh-i-Noor, The Daily Telegraph, June 11, 2017.
Inderjeet Singh Chawla
The Mountain of Light: Empire, Theft, and the Unfinished Reckoning
©inderjeetsinghchawla2026 – inderjeetchawla@gmail.com
“Koh-i-noor” (Mountain of Light, in Persian). The name stuck. The stone now had its own name that
would survive any empires that possessed it.
In 1747, Nadir Shah was assassinated. With his death, the empire fractured. The diamond came
into the hands of his grandson, Shah Rukh, and then to Ahmad Shah Durrani, the first Afghan ruler. The
Durrani dynasty held the throne through decades of internal strife and civil war. By the early 19th century,
a fugitive Durrani prince named Shah Shuja, who took refuge in Lahore, was left to the mercy of the
growing power in Punjab. Maharaja Ranjit Singh had built something remarkable. He was born in 1780 and
had lost one of his eyes to smallpox as a child. By the age of 21, he had already unified the warring Sikh
Misls (confederacies), which had divided Punjab since the decline of the Mughal empire and its authority.
Maharaja Ranjit Singh established himself as the undisputed sovereign of the Sikh Empire. His Empire
extended from the Khyber Pass to the Sutlej River and from Kashmir to the desert of Sindh. By this time,
the British East India Company had subjugated much of the Indian subcontinent and treated the Sikh
Empire with wary respect. The only ruler to whom they could not be bullied was Maharaja Ranjit Singh.
Ranjit Singh knew the value of all power. He modernised his army with European officers and artillery. He
established a sophisticated administration. He assembled one of the great collections of the 19th century.
Lahore, Toshakhana was the royal treasury where gold, jewels, weapons, textiles and sacred relics were
stored.5 The Governor General Lord Auckland’s sister, Fanny Eden, visited Lahore in 18386 and recorded
that the Maharaja had jewels in abundance and decorated his horses with the finest gems. Then she wrote
something more revealing: “Should we ever be permitted to plunder this kingdom, I would go directly to
their stables.” The British knew exactly what they were looking for
The Koh-i-noor came into Ranjit Singh’s possession through Shah Shuja. The stone had been
brought to Lahore in seeking sanctuary by the deposed Afghan king. Ranjit Singh gave him protection, but
he demanded the diamond in return. The negotiation was protracted and coercive. The family of Shah
Shuja had been virtually captured. In 1813, the deal was done. Koh-i-noor was transferred into the hands
of the Sikh Empire. Maharaja Ranjit Singh wore the diamond on his arm during the durbar assemblies. It
was a statement. The stone, which had previously been used to adorn the mighty Mughal emperors and
crowned the Pea{censored} Throne, rested on the bicep of a one-eyed Sikh king, who had come from the chaos
of the eighteenth century and established the last independent kingdom of the subcontinent. The
symbolism was well-intended and intentional.
The question and matters for the argument of this essay is, what did Maharaja Ranjit Singh do?
Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s death unleashed chaos, which the British had been patiently waiting for to erupt.
His eldest legal son, Kharak Singh, ascended to the throne but was regarded as incompetent. He died in a
matter of 16-17 months, possibly by poisoning. On the day of his father’s cremation, Nau Nihal Singh, his
son, was killed by a falling archway. It was rumoured that it was an assassination. The result was the same.
Subsequently, the Sikh Empire came under the control of Sher Singh, another son of Maharaj Ranjit Singh,
who was himself assassinated in 1843. Post Sher Singh’s death, the throne of the Punjab sat under the fiveyear-
old Duleep Singh. His mother, Rani Jind Kaur, as regent. A formidable woman, the British in their
dispatches referred to her as “the Messalina of the Punjab,” a reference to Messalina, the notorious wife of
the Roman Emperor Claudius, deploying the standard colonial tactic of sexual slander against women who
5 Plunder of Lahore Toshakhana, SikhNet, October 9, 2023; The Toshakhana and the Curious Case of the Missing Koh-e-Noor
Diamond, The Friday Times, March 17, 2023.
6Emily Eden, Up the Country: Letters Written to Her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India (London: Richard Bentley,
1866). Both Emily Eden and her sister Fanny accompanied their brother, Governor General Lord Auckland, to
India in 1838. Emily Eden’s published account is the more widely cited source; the quotation attributed to Fanny in
the essay is drawn from her diary as recorded by Fanny herself.
Inderjeet Singh Chawla
The Mountain of Light: Empire, Theft, and the Unfinished Reckoning
©inderjeetsinghchawla2026 – inderjeetchawla@gmail.com
resisted them. Jind Kaur attempted to hold the kingdom together. She failed. The British were too strong,
too patient, and too ruthless.
In 1845, the First Anglo-Sikh War broke out. The British emerged victorious, but at a staggering
cost. The Sikh army had received training from the European officers. It was the ferocity of their soldiers
that left the Company generals shocked.. In 1846, the Treaty of Lahore was signed, which imposed harsh
conditions of diminishing the Sikh Empire, ceding territory, reducing the army, and permanently installing
a British officer in Lahore. However, the Punjab remained nominally independent. The Koh-i-noor
remained in the Toshakhana. The British wanted the kingdom and the diamond. The pretext came from
the Second Anglo-Sikh War (1848-1849). After the war, Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General, acted with
surgical precision, with victory on his side. He dispatched his Secretary, Sir Henry Elliott, to Lahore with
specific instructions. Now ten years old, Duleep Singh was to sign a new treaty. The agreement would give
the British the whole of Punjab. It would also have a particular clause relating to the diamond.
Article III of the Treaty of Lahore, 1849, reads “The gem called the Koh-i-Noor, which was taken
from Shah Sooja-ool-moolk by Maharajah Ranjit Singh, shall be surrendered by the Maharajah of Lahore
to the Queen of England. Each of the clauses should be considered. The verb “surrendered” is not
ambiguous. It is not the language of a giveaway or a gift. It’s the language of surrender. A 10-year-old child
does not surrender anything that is too voluntarily. He signs at the bottom line what the men with guns tell
him to sign. This was perfectly understood at Dalhousie. He had determined that the troublesome nature
of Punjabi independence would not stand in the way of British imperial ambitions. The diamond was treated
separately from the rest of Lahore Toshkhana, precisely because its symbolic value exceeded even its
staggering monetary value. The treaty was not a legal agreement between equals; it was the codification of
conquest. Subsequent positions have been taken by the British government, which claimed the diamond
was acquired lawfully. In a shameful submission before the Supreme Court in 2016, the Solicitor General
of India even claimed that the diamond was “voluntarily given” by Ranjit Singh to the British.7 This was
false on two counts. Ranjit Singh had been dead for a decade. The diamond wasn’t given. It was taken.
The diamond arrived in England in 1850. Lord Dalhousie personally carried it. He presented it to
Queen Victoria not as a gift from the Maharaja of Punjab, that fiction had not yet been fully constructed,
but as a spoil of war. The official record shows that the Governor-General of India presented the diamond
to his sovereign on behalf of the East India Company, which had seized it from the conquered Sikh
kingdom. However, “spoils of war” was an ambiguous term for the British. The 19th century was the era of
humanitarian sentiment. The British public believed in their empire as a civilising force rather than a
kleptocracy. A child king who had to give up his birthright was not the right character of the story. So the
British made up a story.
Duleep Singh was brought to England in 1854, having lost his kingdom at a tender age of eleven.
At the time of his arrival at the court of the queen, who now possessed his diamond he was, Duleep was
15 years old. In the intervening years, the British had worked systematically to remake him. His mother had
been separated from him, imprisoned and exiled to Nepal. He was placed under the guardianship of Dr
John Spencer Login, a British officer appointed to be the keeper of the Sikh Empire’s Toshakhana and who
had taken inventory of the treasures looted by the British. The boy's de facto governess became Login's
wife, Lena. Duleep Singh was baptised as a Christian. English was taught to him. He was dressed in British
attire. In the words of one historian, he was “determinedly absorbed and remodelled by the Victorian
court.”8
The events that followed were orchestrated like a stage play. Duleep Singh was invited to Osborne
House, Queen Victoria’s home on the Isle of Wight. She had learnt that Lady Login that the subject of the
Koh-i-noor was painful for the young Maharaja. The queen asked him whether he had ever talked about it
or felt regret over its loss. Lady Login confirmed that he did. Victoria decided to proceed anyway.
7 All India Human Rights and Social Justice Front v. Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 185/2016 (Supreme Court of
India, April 18, 2016). During this hearing, Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar stated that the Koh-i-Noor was
“voluntarily given” to the British by the successors of Maharaja Ranjit Singh as compensation for help in the Sikh
Wars. This submission drew widespread criticism as it appeared to ignore the coercive circumstances of the 1849
Treaty of Lahore, signed by the ten-year-old Maharaja Duleep Singh.
8 How Duleep Singh ‘Handed’ It to the Queen,’ Tribune, April 21, 2016.
Inderjeet Singh Chawla
The Mountain of Light: Empire, Theft, and the Unfinished Reckoning
©inderjeetsinghchawla2026 – inderjeetchawla@gmail.com
Queen Victoria set up a private audience. She took the recut diamond from its box and placed it
in Duleep Singh's hand. Lady Login was present, who recorded the scene in her memoirs.9 The Maharaja
held the diamond in his hand and held it up to the sun. His face showed what Lena described in her
memoirs, “a passion of repressed emotion,” as the room grew tense. Lady Login wrote that she was afraid
he would "in a fit of madness throw out the precious talisman of the open window.” Then the British would
immediately weaponise what Duleep Singh had done. He walked to the queen, bowed and returned the
diamond to her hands. “It is to me, Ma’am, the greatest pleasure thus to have the opportunity, as a loyal
subject, of myself tendering to my Sovereign, the Koh-i-Noor.
The British narrative has treated this moment as a voluntary gift ever since. Now a devoted subject
of the empire and a Christian gentleman, the Maharaja gave his diamond to his queen. The Treaty of Lahore
disappeared from the story. The stolen diamond became a freely given token of affection. It's where the
“gift” story took its roots, from which the British Government continues to use. The reality is clear as
crystal. A teenage boy, stripped of his kingdom, separated from his family, especially his mother, that too
at a very tender age, forcibly converted, surrounded by the subjects of a colonial power that destroyed his
family, plundered his inheritance and nation and handed over his stolen property by the woman who did
not possess it. He knew and understood the script he had been trained for it for years to perform it and
then spent the rest of his life regretting it. Duleep Singh later called Queen Victoria “Mrs Fagin,”,invoking
the notorious fence in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and applying the name with bitter irony to the queen,
casting her as the receiver of his stolen inheritance. He attempted to reclaim the lost empire and even
attempted to return to Sikhism. He ended up a broken man and died in 1893 in a Paris hotel, impoverished
and embittered, a man who had spent his entire adult life trying to undo the performance of his adolescence.
The diamond stayed in the possession of the British. The charade at Osborne House in 1854 was not an
act of generosity It was a psychological coercion dressed in the costumes of ceremony. The 15-year-old
Maharaja did not donate. He was being held hostage and acting out a script devised by his captors. This
was known to the British Crown at the time. It knows this now. For one hundred and seventy years, it has
chosen to maintain the fiction
The diamond had been recut in 1852. The pre-cut Mughal stone was originally 186 carats. Its
brilliance was not up to the British taste, and they used the services of a Dutch cutter who spent 38 days
reducing it to 105.6 carats. The cutting was highly controversial, even in its time. The process was personally
supervised by Prince Albert. The result was a diamond of greater sparkle but diminished mass, a metaphor
for what empires do to the objects it acquires: it reshapes them for the metropolitan tastes and call the
result improved.
The Koh-i-noor now sits within the guarded domain of the Tower of London, with multiple parties
claiming ownership. India asserts ownership based on the diamond’s geographic origin and its long history
within the subcontinent. Pakistan claims it because the Sikh Empire’s capital, Lahore, lies within Pakistan’s
borders. Afghanistan claims it through the Durrani dynasty, which held the stone before Ranjit Singh. Iran
has at times advanced claims based on Nadir Shah's conquest. Even the Jagannath Temple in Puri has a
documented claim through Maharaja Ranjit Singh's will.10 While the British government skilfully makes use
of these conflicting claims, the argument runs: since the previous owners of the diamond cannot come to
a consensus on who is entitled to it, the British can hold it as neutral custodians. The multiplicity of claims
becomes a justification for inaction. The colonial power presents its own intransigence as a solution to a
problem it created. This line of reasoning is sophistical. The moral principle gets confused by a practical
obstacle. Multiple claimants don’t absolve the present possessor of the obligation and responsibility to
return the stolen property. It merely complicates the logistics of return. The complication is real, but it is
not dispositive. The strongest claim comes from the Sikh community, more specifically, those who are
9Lena Login, Sir John Login and Duleep Singh (London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1890). Lady Login’s memoir is the primary
eyewitness account of the July 1854 Osborne House encounter.
10Bring Back Kohinoor Diamond, Gift It to Jagannath Temple: BJD MP, Zee News, May 3, 2016; Odisha Body
Claims Kohinoor Belongs to Lord Jagannath, Seeks Its Return from UK, Tribune, September 13, 2022.
Inderjeet Singh Chawla
The Mountain of Light: Empire, Theft, and the Unfinished Reckoning
©inderjeetsinghchawla2026 – inderjeetchawla@gmail.com
descendants of the Sikh Empire, from which the diamond was forcibly taken. This is based on three pillars:
the conditions for taking, the victim’s specific identity, and the legal principle that property can be recovered
only from the party from whom it was stolen, not from a prior owner further up in the chain of provenance.
The Koh-i-noor was taken from the Sikh Empire. It was taken from the grandson of Ranjit Singh, named
Duleep Singh. The mechanism of taking, by a treaty signed under duress by a small child, would be void
and invalid in any mature and serious legal system. The Treaty of Lahore of 1849 does not qualify as a
legitimate or valid contract. It’s a history of conquest by a colonial empire. A ten-year-old boy’s signature
extracted at the point of a gun does not transfer the title. Any first-year law student can identify this as
voidable for duress, incapacity, and unconscionability. The British government’s reliance on the treaty is
legally embarrassing and morally bankrupt.
Ranjit Singh's will complicates but does not defeat the Sikh claim. The Maharaja wanted the
diamond to be presented to the Jagannath Temple. That’s good enough, a wish to be respected. However,
the diamond never reached Jaganath Puri. Before the bequest was to be carried out, the British seized. The
Jagannath Temple has a legitimate grievance against the British for frustrating the bequest. However, the
immediate victim of the theft was the Sikh Empire, the state that held the diamond when it was seized. The
Sikh claim is not diminished by the existence of the will. In fact, the will had the effect of strengthening the
Sikh claim as it clearly demonstrates that the diamond was not just state property and could be disposed of
by any successor Government. It was under the specific instructions of its owner. The British were familiar
with those instructions. They disregarded them. The primary wrong was the dispossession of the Sikh
Empire. The secondary wrong was the frustration of the charitable bequest.
The argument for returning the diamond to the Sikh community gains force from the injury and
wrongdoing inflicted on the Sikh Empire, which was a distinct political entity. In this instance, the entity
that suffered was not India and Pakistan, the newly formed nation-states or even Afghanistan. The Sikh
Empire was a sovereign kingdom with its own dynasty, its own army and treasury. The Empire was
conquered by the English as an independent state, and the diamond taken from its treasury was Sikh
property, not the property of any other nation-state. India and Pakistan received territorial sovereignty at
the time of their independence in 1947, but they did not receive ownership rights to the items stolen by the
British from the Sikh Empire a century before independence. The Sikh community, the people whose
ancestors built the kingdom, fought the wars, and lost the diamond, retains a moral claim that transcends
the colonial-era partition of the subcontinent. This is not an argument that the diamond belongs exclusively
to Ranjit Singh's descendants. The Sikh community is not reducible to a single family dynastic line. The
arguments remain that the diamond should be returned to an independent Sikh institution, a trust or a
museum that solely represents the continuity of the community from which the diamond was taken. It’s
the principle that matters, while the practical details can be negotiated
The world has confronted this problem before. It has found solutions that were amicable. The
most instructive precedent and prime example is the restitution of artworks and cultural property looted by
the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. The Nazi regime from 1933 until 1945 carried out the biggest
program for organised theft in human history. Works of art such as paintings, sculptures, books, jewels,
and religious icons belonging to Jewish families and synagogues were seized, along with those taken from
museums and churches. This looting was systematic, bureaucratic, and ideologically motivated; it formed
part of Nazism and was not an accidental occurrence. It was central to it. The Nazis knew that stripping a
community of its cultural patrimony was part of stripping them of their humanity. Post-WWII, the Allied
powers started a slow process of restitution. This was an arduous task, and the process was imperfect. Many
of these works and artefacts remained unrecovered; many claimants had been murdered and subjected to
mass extermination. However, a legal framework for dealing emerged post the conference that was held in
Washington in 1998 on the Holocaust-era assets. This led to the formulation of the Washington Principles
on Nazi-Confiscated Art, endorsed by more than forty nations, which established that art that had been
confiscated by the Nazis and not subsequently resituated should be identified.11 They called for archives to
be opened, for claims to be encouraged, and for just and fair solutions to be reached expeditiously.
The Washington Principles are not legally binding in the very strict sense. Instead, they operate on
moral suasion and public pressure. Nonetheless, it has been effective. Hundreds of artworks were restored
11Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, U.S. Department of State, December 3, 1998,
Inderjeet Singh Chawla
The Mountain of Light: Empire, Theft, and the Unfinished Reckoning
©inderjeetsinghchawla2026 – inderjeetchawla@gmail.com
to their rightful heirs. Even museum collections, which have exhibited some artwork for decades, have
surrendered them. Art auctions have been voided due to sales under duress, identified as stolen assets.
Some countries even amended their laws to make the restitution easier. The world recognised that theft
cannot become legitimate through the passage of time. The parallel to colonial plundering is precise in all
material respects. The East India Company and the Great Britain crown engaged in the same activity as the
Nazis towards the Jewish people. They identified objects of value, seized them by force, fraud and coercion,
and incorporated them in their own trophies as spoils of war and systemised looting. The British used paper
trails to conceal the theft and relied on coercive legal documents, just like the Nazis did. The British
considered cultural objects as war booty; the Nazis did likewise. The sole substantive distinction between
the two cases is the identity of the victims. The Nazis stole from the Jews. The British stole from the
colonies. The international community, dominated for centuries by the European powers, considered
crimes against Europeans to be serious and crimes against Asians to be ultimately historical. That double
standard is the unspoken premise of every British reluctance to discuss restitution. If paintings looted by
Hermann Göring from Jewish art collectors in Paris were to be returned to their rightful owners, and not
remain in museums where they’ve been held for the past eighty years, then the Koh-i-Noor should rightfully
return in the hands of the community from which it was forcibly taken, and not be locked away in the
Tower of London. The passage of one hundred and seventy years does not lessen the crime of theft; it
makes the failure to rectify it more shameful. The British establishment realises the strength of this analogy,
which is why they try so desperately to resist its use. The 1970 United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) convention that deals with the prohibition and prevention of the illicit
importing, exporting, and transfer of ownership of cultural property is not retroactive. This means that it
cannot be applied to objects that were removed before 1970. The Koh-i-noor diamond was removed in
1849. The British are pleased about such technicalities as being able to invoke a treaty drafted to preserve
their ill-got gains and serves as a moral defence. It does not. The non-retroactivity of positive law is a
technicality, not a principle. Murder was wrong before it was criminalised. Theft was immoral and wrong
before UNESCO.
The royal family of Britain has developed a well-practised technique when it comes to the issue of
dealing with the Koh-i-noor diamond controversy. It chooses not to acknowledge, nor engage. On the
occasion of Camilla’s coronation ceremony as Queen Consort to King Charles III in May 2023, the royal
family announced that she would not be wearing the crown set with the Koh-i-noor diamond.12 This
decision was seen by many as a diplomatic gesture towards India to pacify their anger regarding the
ownership of the gem. It was anything but that, but simply damage control. The palace understood that
images of a British queen wearing a diamond that was stolen would circulate globally and provoke precisely
the kind of debate that this essay represents. The solution was not to return the diamond to the rightful
owner, the solution was to keep it out of the photographs and avoid any kind of controversy. This is the
standard stance and a classic posture of an institution that has a lot of hide. There will be no debate on the
Koh-i-noor by the Crown, because the debate implies the existence of a question. The Crown’s position is
that there is no question, the diamond is the British property, lawfully acquired, and the matter stands
closed. Every refusal to either engage, every demurral, every well-worded statement of denial ‘on the advice
of ministers’, is an assertion, a declaration that power had the right to determine reality. Britain had taken
control of the diamond because it could, and Britain retains the diamond because it can. The moral
arguments are irrelevant. Might made right in 1849, and the passage of time has converted might into a
simulacrum of legality. This is not a position anyone in good standing or a serious person should take or
accept. Legitimacy isn’t dependent on time. Something wrong does not turn into something right simply
because it has been around long enough. The Kohinoor is stolen property. The Crown recognises that it is
stolen property and stoic silence is an admission it cannot afford to make aloud.
12 Camilla, Wife of Britain’s King Charles, Will Not Wear Disputed Koh-i-Noor Diamond for Coronation, Tribune,
February 15, 2023.
Inderjeet Singh Chawla
The Mountain of Light: Empire, Theft, and the Unfinished Reckoning
©inderjeetsinghchawla2026 – inderjeetchawla@gmail.com
The restitution of the Koh-i-noor will not be an easy administrative act. It will involve dealing with
the different stakeholders who each have a valid and legitimate connection to the stone. It will entail the
recognition by the British government that its predecessors were guilty of wrongdoing and that wrong
requires rectification. It will require the surrender of one of the most prized possessions of the Crown.
In the current posture taken by the British government, it becomes clear that there is no leeway
for any kind of negotiation whatsoever. With the stance taken by the British government on the legal
acquisition of the diamond and the certainty of its rightful ownership, the British government makes it
impossible to enter into the conversation demanded by the Washington Principles. This is not an issue of
honest disagreement about history, but an outright refusal to take part in the process set out by the
international community. The British argument that the multiplicity of claimants justifies indefinite British
custody is particularly offensive. It imagines the British monarchy as a neutral trustee, holding the diamond
for the benefit of the disputing parties until they can agree among themselves. But the British monarchy is
not neutral. It is one of the disputing parties. It is the party that currently possesses the diamond. It is the
party that profited from the original theft. For the Crown to present itself as an impartial custodian is like
a burglar offering to hold onto stolen goods until the victims can agree on who gets what.
Zohran Mamdani's remarks in 2026 did not create the controversy over the Koh-i-noor. They
revealed a controversy that had never been resolved. The diamond remains, as William Dalrymple has
observed, “a hugely emotional issue.” Onto this “one little stone, sitting in a glass cabinet in London, has
been projected all the pain that South Asia feels about colonialism.”13 This pain is not an abstraction. The
British Empire extracted enormous wealth from the subcontinent for over two centuries. The drain of
wealth theory put forth and attributed by Indian nationalists at the turn of the 19th century and confirmed
by modern economic historians, holds that Britain extracted trillions of pounds in today’s money from
India through taxes, trade imbalances, and outright plunder. The Koh-i-noor represents this loot. It is a
tangible manifestation of what was taken. That it remains inside the Tower of London stands as a testament
to the official reminder that what was taken has not been returned. Colonialism was not a historical episode
that ended in 1947. Colonialism was a deliberate act of exploitation, organised theft, plunder, and erasure
of culture whose consequences still structure the global distribution of wealth and power. The Koh-i-Noor
diamond is in Britain because the global order of things was built in favour of those nations that colonised
the rest of the world. The former colonies can make demands for the return of their heritage. They cannot
compel their return. The asymmetry of power that enabled the theft in 1849 continues to block restitution
in 2026. Breaking that asymmetry requires more than diplomatic requests. It requires moral pressure that
the British establishment cannot ignore. This demands that the ex-colonies and their diaspora communities
insist again and again, publicly, that the symbols of looted artefacts must be returned to the rightful owners.
This demands the likes of Zohran Mamdani to leverage their prominence and platforms in bringing
attention to the injustice, name the crime and demand its rectification. This demands that historians and
journalists document the events to such an extent that the British narrative of lawful acquisition becomes
unsustainable and falls apart.
This essay is part of that project. The facts are not in dispute. The Koh-i-noor was mined in India;
it belonged to the Kakatiyas, the Mughals, the Afsharids, the Durranis, and finally the Sikhs. Maharaja Ranjit
Singh willed it to the Jagannath Temple in Puri. Lord Dalhousie forced a ten-year-old child to sign it away
in a treaty of surrender. Queen Victoria got it as plunder. The British court coerced the teenage Duleep
Singh and forced him to perform a charade of a voluntary gift. The diamond has remained in London ever
since, having had its past rewritten to make its appropriation legitimate and the theft rebranded as a legal
acquisition.
Irrespective of all of this, the diamond must be returned. The proper recipients are the Sikh
community, represented through institutions that they chose to designate. The framework for restitution
13 William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond (London:
Bloomsbury, 2017), 261.
Inderjeet Singh Chawla
The Mountain of Light: Empire, Theft, and the Unfinished Reckoning
©inderjeetsinghchawla2026 – inderjeetchawla@gmail.com
already exists. The world used it to return Nazi loot. It can be used to return imperial loot. The only thing
missing is the political will to acknowledge that wrongs committed against brown people in the nineteenth
century are just as real as wrongs committed against white people in the twentieth. The Koh-i-noor is a
stone. It is also a test. The British Crown has been failing that test for a hundred and seventy years. It is
time to pass it.
