When King Charles III and Queen Camilla are officially crowned at Westminster Abbey on Saturday, the Duchess of Sussex won’t be the only thing missing.
The controversy-stirring Kohinoor diamond — the 105-carat sparkler at the center of the violet crown Camilla was expected to wear — won’t make an appearance. The royals have good reason to want to keep the gem out of Saturday’s coronation festivities. The crown jewel of the crown jewels is widely considered an ill-gotten spoil of Britain’s colonial conquests, and calls for the British to return the stone to India have grown increasingly loud since the death of Queen Elizabeth II last year. (The current Indian government, under Narendra Modi, has vacillated on whether it wants the diamond back, but many others do.) The British have yet to heed them.
Flashing the Kohinoor (also sometimes spelled Koh-i-noor) might have attracted the wrong sort of attention, but attempting to simply hide away a colonial past doesn’t work when it comes to the royals: With the death of the queen last year came a massive reassessment of the symbolism of British royalty and the moral and cultural wrongs of colonialism it has perpetrated and continues to condone explicitly and implicitly, particularly by keeping plundered artifacts. Even in trying to avoid one controversy, they’ve stepped into another one. The Cullinan diamonds, chipped off a massive diamond taken from South African mines, will be part of the coronation, and sure enough, South Africans want those back, too.
The Kohinoor landed in British hands in the 1840s, when the colonial British East India Company wrested it, and other property and land, from an Indian boy-king — a Sikh emperor who was just 10 or 11 at the time — in the cruelest of ways. The British imprisoned his mother, leaving him no choice but to turn over the gem.
It was no accident: Vox has reported that the British plundered an estimated $45 trillion (in today’s currency) from India…
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