No Koh-i-Noor in royal coronation, but its intrigue continues to inspire

Queen Consort Camilla will instead wear Queen Mary's crown at King Charles III's coronation in May

The Koh-i-Noor diamond is back in the headlines. The 105.6-carat giant gem, which William Dalrymple describes as “the world's most infamous diamond” in his book on the history of the stone, will not be part of the next British Royal coronation ceremony.
 
The Queen Consort Camilla will not be donning the contentious diamond for her coronation at Westminster Abbey in May, Buckingham Palace has announced. The Koh-i-Noor, which is one of the world’s largest cut diamonds, is traditionally held in The Queen Mother's Crown, worn by Queen Elizabeth the Second during her coronation. Camilla will wear the Queen Mary crown, commissioned and worn by the consort of King George V for the 1911 coronation. The Queen Mary Crown has been taken out of the Tower of London's collection to be modified for the event on May 6 and decorated with the Cullinan III, IV and V diamonds.

 
The Koh-i-Noor was taken from India by the East India Company during the colonial era and presented to Queen Victoria. Pakistan, part of British-ruled India, and Afghanistan have also claimed ownership of it since India’s independence in 1947.
 

It is the fraught history and the mesh of claims and counterclaims that made Camilla opt out of flashing the “mountain of light” (as Koh-i-Noor means) on her royal crown. But it is also these fraught histories that have made the Koh-i-Noor one of the world’s most storied gems. Indian films and songs notwithstanding, the diamond has been mentioned and shown in several music videos, films, and TV series across the world.

 
The gem has become an icon for not just material brilliance but colonial and cultural exploitation, historical intrigues, and global Indian identity.
 
For instance, the Koh-i-Noor was one of the inspirations for the eponymous gemstone in The Moonstone (1868), a 19th-century British epistolary novel by Wilkie Collins. The Moonstone is often believed to be the first full-length English detective novel. Collins based his eponymous "Moonstone" on the histories of the Orlov, a 189.62-carat (37.9 g) diamond in the Russian Imperial Sceptre, and the Koh-i-Noor.
 
Then, Agatha Christie's 1925 detective novel, The Secret of Chimneys, finds the giant gem hidden somewhere inside a large country house after, according to the fictional plot, it was stolen from the Tower of London by a Parisian gang leader. George MacDonald Fraser's 1990 historical satire, Flashman and the Mountain of Light, refers to the diamond in its title.

 
Indian film stars, of course, have tried to recover or steal the contested diamond several times. Hrithik Roshan tried twice, successfully. Once in Dhoom 2 (2006), where he bags the Queen’s crown in the opening scene. And once in Bang Bang! (2014).
 
In Kolkatay Kohinoor, a 2019 mystery thriller film, Soumitra Chatterjee and Sabyasachi Chakraborty — both famed for playing Satyajit Ray’s super sleuth Feluda across two generations of Feluda films — team up to prove that the real Koh-i-Noor was never sent to Britain and remained hidden somewhere in Kolkata.
 
But it is in music that the diamond finds the most mention.
 
From a common example of bling to the numerous mentions in Indian music as an allegory for beauty, preciousness and romance, the diamond has most recently been featured in Indian-origin American rappers’ narratives of displacement and identitarian crises. Indian-born American rapper Rajakumari’s “NRI” comes up as a prime example.

 
With repeated appeals of its return and as one of the most oft-cited examples of imperial theft in pop culture, it is no wonder the Koh-i-Noor diamond will be kept out of the limelight of the next royal coronation.