A friend recently returned from London and was recounting his experiences. Most of it was the usual stuff of how impressive things are in the West as compared to India. But then he began talking about his visit to the Tower of London and seeing the Kohinoor diamond, which now is part of the crown jewels.
The Kohinoor is a point of irritation for many Indians. There is a general feeling that the British stole it from us and took it away with them. That assumption is factually wrong. It was given by the Maharaja Duleep Singh, a ruler of the Sikh dynasty, to the queen after he was defeated as a sign of his loyalty to her. This happened in 1849. The British would rule the Indian subcontinent for a further century. At the time the diamond was taken nobody had yet conceived the idea of India as we know it.
The 19th century was a different time. Invading other people and taking their wealth was the norm of the day. No one people or individual had a monopoly on this behaviour. Invaders of every ilk behaved in the same way. Neither was it reserved for people from other religions. It wasn’t like Muslim rulers were not doing this to other Muslim kingdoms, or Hindu conquerors were not doing it to other Hindu kingdoms. The very intent of attacking another kingdom was to capture their wealth. Now if that wealth happened to be in bars of gold, it was taken. If it was stored as idols that was taken.
For instance, the Vijayanagara kingdom fought against and defeated the Gajapatis in Odisha. Both the dynasties were Hindu. The Vijayanagara kingdom also fought against the Deccan sultanates, not because they were Muslim but because they were the neighbouring kingdoms. Every time they were victorious, they looted the defeated kingdom.
Until the advent of money in its modern form, lending for business, and banks appeared, there was only one way to increase your wealth – you took someone else’s. Such behaviour was par for the time.
Bringing back the Kohinoor does not solve any of the problems India faces today. Its presence on Indian soil will not miraculously educate the population and make it employable. It will not miraculously put nutritious food in the bellies of the millions of undernourished children in the country. It will not make the flooding that is caused by indiscriminate construction to go away. It will not make us hate each other any less.
The Kohinoor is more part of world heritage than specific to Indian heritage just as the Taj Mahal, Aryabhatta, or the Sun temple at Konark. Just because we live on the land mass on which these things or people lived centuries ago doesn’t make it our heritage.
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