In addition to jeweled armory and gem-studded princely clothing, a cabinet in the India exhibit contained a dazzling array of ornaments, many of which had previously been housed in the Lahore treasury along with the Koh-i-Noor. The famed Daria-i-Noor had been heavily publicized in papers before the exhibition opened and appeared in an armlet, a massive pink table-cut diamond surrounded by ten smaller diamonds. Reports circulated about its exceptional quality and inconceivable value, but like many of the jeweled objects in the India court, its opulence was jarring to visitors, with one observer calling it “a gem of prodigious beauty, but obscured by the tastelessness of its setting.”¹⁶ The sartorial conventions of South Asian kingship had for a long time captured the attention of European travelers to the subcontinent whose fascination with and aversion to the bejeweled male body appear in numerous personal accounts about the Eastern rulers’ predilection for extravagance and luxury.¹⁷ Such reactions persisted among visitors who strolled through the India exhibit, aligning the princely opulence of India with exorbitant vanity and excess. At the Great Exhibition, the masculine pursuits of progress, machinery, industry, and science were clearly differentiated from feminine concerns with jewelry, clothing, textiles, and luxury. This division effectively aligned the interests and behaviors of Indian rulers with the consumption habits of women. Indeed, the process of miniaturizing and domesticating India at the Crystal Palace was simultaneously a process of feminizing the subcontinent.

Touted by the press as the “Lion of the Great Exhibition,” the Koh-i-Noor sat in its own specially designated exhibition space, isolated from the timeless “fairyland” of the India court. The three diamonds of Ranjit Singh’s armlet were removed from their setting and suspended between prongs in a manner that presented them in a more raw form (fig. 7). The Koh-i-Noor and its sister diamonds were displayed under a structure described by the Illustrated London News as “a golden cage or a prison” and by another observer as a “great parrot-cage with gilded bars,” topped with a small golden crown.¹⁸ The grandiose display was ostensibly to protect the stones from theft, but this method of display also meant that viewers could only see the diamonds from a considerable distance, through the bars of a cage, and finally under a glass dome within which they were contained. Beneath its imposing enclosure, the diamond “appeared the size of a pigeon’s egg” or, as another spectator remarked, “not bigger than half a fair-sized walnut.”¹⁹ The “Mountain of Light” that had been so widely reported in the press was rendered minuscule and unimpressive under the formidable confines of the British crown.

In addition to being thoroughly miniaturized and domesticated through its display, the Koh-i-Noor was also, like the India court, presented as a spectacle with a feminine appeal. Women in particular were reported as losing all sense of civility and public grace in the presence of the Koh-i-Noor. It was designated as “the loadstone [sic] of the fairer sex,” and one visitor remarked, “Wherever the ladies obstruct circulation and crowd one on the other you may be sure there are jewels exhibited.”²⁰ An illustration in the satirical weekly publication Punch demonstrates this correlation between women and the Koh-i-Noor diamond, as ladies in their imposing hoop skirts swarm around the jewel, which is completely hidden from view (fig. 8). The gold enclosure towers over them, its voluminous shape mimicking the rounded edges of the women’s skirts. The cage itself appears like a giant hoop skirt with a crown at its top, transforming the diamond’s confines into the imperial body of Queen Victoria, who subsumes the Koh-i-Noor and, by extension, all of India represented by it.

For hours, crowds waited to catch a glimpse of the fabled Koh-i-Noor, which “disappointed the public in no ordinary degree.”²¹ Assuming it would be much larger, many were dismayed at its size, while others were confused by its “ungraceful peculiarity of shape” and the “ineffective manner” in which it had been cut.²² In describing the appearance of the diamond, one author wrote rather unfavorably, “It was however almost devoid of shape. That it did not possess any beauty as an ornament, at least in that respect, may be surmised when we state that its conformation was, as near as possible, that of the hulk of a vessel, one of whose stern corners had been completely sliced off.”²³ Most disappointing of all, however, was that the diamond failed to shine. Under its massive cage, the stone “had by no means the dazzling lustre that its romantic history … would naturally lead you to expect.”²⁴ Various efforts were made to improve its appearance throughout the duration of the Great Exhibition, but nothing was successful at increasing its sparkle. “To ordinary eyes it is nothing more than an egg-shaped lump of glass. … On ordinary days, that is, the shilling days, it is exposed in its great cage, ornamented with a policeman, and they rely on the sun to cause it to sparkle; but on the Friday and Saturday it puts on its best dress; it is arrayed in a tent of red cloth, and the interior is supplied with a dozen little jets of gas, which throw their light on the god of the temple. Unhappily, the Koh-i-Noor does not sparkle even then.”²⁵ After all the attention that the Koh-i-Noor had garnered in the press before the opening of the Great Exhibition, even in “its best dress” the boorish “mountain” was no larger than a nut, and the “light” it cast paled in comparison even to the dull English sun.

Disheartened and ashamed by the diamond’s reception, Prince Albert resorted to science and technology to improve the Koh-i-Noor. He wanted the stone recut, an assault on the jewel that would increase its luster but inevitably reduce its size. That its shine did not meet the expectations of the public was due in large part to the manner in which it had been cut for its Eastern owners. Diamonds were first discovered and traded in India as early as the fourth century BC, and of greatest value to Indians was the crystal’s octahedral shape.²⁶ Interest had long been in preserving as much of the diamond’s natural size and shape as possible for the wearer to benefit most from the stone’s talismanic properties. The Koh-i-Noor was shaped in what is today referred to as the mughal cut, defined in the 1977 Diamond Dictionary as “an older style of cutting which is a rather lumpy form with a broad, often asymmetrical base, an upper termination consisting of a set of usually four shallow facets or a table, and two or more zones of strip facets parallel to the base and oriented vertically. It is derived from cleavage pieces” (fig. 9).²⁷ This method of cutting the stone generally required far less intrusion and loss than the rose cut and the later brilliant cut, both of which enhanced the diamond’s light effects through many small, inclined facets.²⁸ These more complex methods of cutting were preferred in Europe, with ever-increasing efforts to achieve perfect symmetry and the most brilliant sparkle. The Koh-i-Noor did not, therefore, conform to European tastes and was viewed as cumbersome, “badly mutilated,” and in “an incomplete condition.”²⁹

To correct the diamond, Albert first contacted a number of British academic scientists to seek their advice on how best to refashion the stone and release from the jewel its fullest light.³⁰ He next approached diamond cutters, many of whom refused to be implicated in the cutting of the Koh-i-Noor out of concern that it would be irreparably damaged.³¹ A plan for the stone’s recutting was devised and submitted by the Coster firm in Amsterdam, assuring Albert that only a negligible amount of the carat weight would have to be discarded in the process. The plan was accepted and, on July 16, 1852, the aggressive procedure of reshaping the diamond began.³² To inaugurate the process, the eighty-three-year-old Duke of Wellington was invited to make the first cut. He was the great savior of the empire and most venerated military leader in Britain for his successful campaigns in India and, more important, for having defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. As the emblem par excellence of British masculinity, his appointment as the first to strike the diamond further suggests an assertion of British masculine forces on the former emblem of Indian masculine power.

The press once again eagerly publicized Albert’s role in the process as a pioneer of progress, with a squadron of supportive scientists, technicians, and military heroes at his behest. He personally oversaw the thirty-eight-day process of the Koh-i-Noor’s transformation; like the Great Exhibition in the previous year, the cutting of the diamond became his project, through which he could assert his masculine identity and inscribe it permanently onto the stone. The primacy of British technology, machinery, and taste would be carved into the Koh-i-Noor, and, if successful, it would be a victory both for Britain and for the prince consort. While the London press reiterated the Coster firm’s promise that the diamond could be cut without greatly reducing its size, the claim quickly unraveled as it became evident that the stone could not sustain such a drastic alteration without significant loss. In the end, 43 percent of the Koh-i-Noor’s original carat weight was lopped off; the legendary 186-carat mughal cut diamond was replaced by a 105-carat oval stellar brilliant.³³

Meanwhile, in India, the deposed maharaja Duleep Singh was enduring his own civilizing process, having been placed by Dalhousie in the care of John and Lena Login in 1849. At age twelve, he decided of his own will to convert to Christianity and was enthusiastic about a visit to England. In an appeal to the Government House for permission to travel, the young maharaja wrote, “I wish to say that I am very anxious to go, and quite ready to start whenever his Lordship gives me permission. I do not want to go to make a show of myself, but to study and complete my education, and I wish to live in England as quietly as possible.”³⁴ Permission was granted, and he arrived in London in the summer of 1854.

Upon meeting him, Queen Victoria was so impressed by the fifteen-year-old maharaja’s handsome Sikh costume that she had Franz Winterhalter paint his portrait. A favorite of Victoria’s, the artist had Duleep Singh stand on a dais in order to elongate his stocky frame, explaining to him that he would “grow into” the picture. As the maharaja remained rather short his entire life, the painting portrays a svelte and excessively flattering version of the subject.³⁵ Winterhalter’s painting depicts the young king in his Indian finery, dressed in silks and wearing some of the jewels he was allowed to keep when the Lahore treasury was confiscated (fig. 10). Set against an imagined desert landscape with minarets and a dome in the distance, Duleep Singh stands in all his exotic princely splendor.

Amid his many jewels, a small portrait of Queen Victoria hangs off a five-strand pearl choker he wears tightly around his neck, a pendant that displays both his allegiance to and dependence on the queen.

It was while he was posing for his portrait that Victoria decided to show Duleep Singh the new Koh-i-Noor. An account from Mrs. Login’s memoirs describes the awkward encounter, during which the maharaja saw and touched his diamond that had been reduced to nearly half its size:

When news reached Dalhousie of Duleep Singh’s gesture, he wrote that the “talk about the Koh-i-Noor being a present from Dhuleep Singh to the Queen is arrant humbug. He knew as well as I did that it was nothing of the sort: and if I had been within a thousand miles of him he would not have dared to utter such a piece of trickery.”³⁷ Duleep Singh made no mention then or ever about the many other jewels of the Lahore treasury that had, since their display at the Crystal Palace, been given to Queen Victoria by the East India Company “as a reward for her interest in their exhibit.”³⁸ Later in life, however, he would refer to the queen as “Mrs. Fagin,” a receiver of stolen goods, and make several unsuccessful attempts to reclaim the Koh-i-Noor and his kingdom, both of which he felt had been unjustly obtained.³⁹

The jewel-wearing kings of India had come to be aligned with opulence and femininity in England, with many of their precious gems, like Duleep Singh’s Koh-i-Noor, finding new homes on the bodies of English women. Marcia Pointon has proposed that diamonds worn on the bodies of British royal women could be read symbolically as expressions of fecundity and fertility (as opposed to pearls, which had become synonymous with the virginal self-fashioning of Queen Elizabeth I).⁴⁰ Yet, though diamonds in Europe were worn on women’s bodies, it was men who dominated the economic and scientific fields associated with them, establishing areas in which they could be involved with diamonds “without compromising ideas about their masculinity.”⁴¹ Thus, staging diamonds on the body of a woman asserted a man’s wealth and power while simultaneously accentuating the wearer’s feminine beauty.

The Koh-i-Noor that had adorned the brows and biceps of Indian despots for generations was transformed into an ornamental brooch on the breast of the queen, with Prince Albert orchestrating and supervising the entire procedure (fig. 11). Wearing the diamond was yet another way in which Victoria’s private and public identities were conflated, bridging her body politic as female monarch with her body natural or body personal as adored (and adorned) wife.⁴² Through it, she managed to enhance her feminine public persona, announce the power and affection of her husband, proclaim her imperial fortitude, and assert the conclusive subordination of India under her rule—all with just one stone.

During Victoria’s life, the Koh-i-Noor was set in a brooch, a bracelet, a tiara, and a regal circlet and continued to be reset following her death in 1901.⁴³ The diamond was placed in the crown worn by Alexandra for the coronation of her husband, King Edward VII, and subsequently by the queen consorts Mary in 1911 and Elizabeth in 1937. Elizabeth, the queen mother, was the last royal to wear the diamond, which was the central stone of her crown for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. Since its arrival in England, and in keeping with the British effeminization of the Koh-i-Noor, the diamond has never been worn by a male, reserved exclusively for the adornment of queen consorts since the death of Victoria.⁴⁴

The miniaturized, feminized, and domesticated India presented at the Crystal Palace stood in stark opposition to the grand masculinist principles of science, industry, and progress advocated by the Great Exhibition. The Koh-i-Noor itself endured a process of emasculation through its reduction and subsequent deployment as a decorative ornament reserved exclusively for women. That the Koh-i-Noor’s life in Britain is a metaphor for the civilizing mission inflicted on India is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the famous words of John Forbes Royle, who, in 1849, did not say that India was “the jewel in the crown” of the British Empire, but rather that India was the “Koh-i-Noor of the British Crown.”⁴⁵ Though its association with India is less palpable today than it was in the nineteenth century, in its altered form and current setting the diamond remains associated with imperial conquest and royal femininity.

The process of feminizing the stone heightened Albert’s masculine presentation through his imposition of Western science and technology on the diamond as well as his essential role in transforming the stone from a jewel of kings to an heirloom on his wife’s breast. When worn by Victoria, the Koh-i-Noor was more than just a symbol of India’s subservience; it was, as with other British women who displayed diamonds, a declaration of her husband’s masculine power. In India the Koh-i-Noor had always been a power symbol of men, worn in their turbans and on their biceps as an emblem of valor and fortitude. In England, too, the diamond passed through the hands of many men who used it to assert their masculinity—at the jewel’s expense, however. Today, the Koh-i-Noor’s legacy among emperors, sultans, and maharajas has been erased entirely from its context and surface. Enshrined behind bulletproof glass at the Tower of London, the diamond remains a static symbol of the former submission of India to the British crown and as a decorative ornament in the regalia of British royal women.