Synopsis
IN JANUARY, 1850, Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General of India, left the newly annexed Punjab Empire and travelled to Bombay. A few months before, the British government of India had forced the eleven-year-old Maharajah Dalip Singh to sign a treaty, giving up his mammoth Punjab Empire—now and in perpetuity—and all the enormous wealth of his treasury. And, one very precious item from the treasury.
This, Dalhousie carried very secretly on his person tucked into his trousers, in a chamois leather bag his wife had stitched for him, with a loop that went around his belt. When the Governor-General slept at night, two ferocious mastiffs, Baron and Banda, were chained to his camp bed to guard him, and the contents of that bag.
Two months later, a Royal navy steam sloop, the HMS Medea left for England from Bombay. On board was the bag, and the two men in charge of it—Captain Ramsay and Colonel Mackeson. The captain of the Medea had orders to escort these two non-naval men, and he knew nothing else.
When Queen Victoria opened the bag and shook out the contents into the palm of her hand, a gold armlet fell out. It had a central diamond—186 carats—and two smaller diamonds on either side.
Then, only then—because Dalhousie had secreted the diamond out of India—was the news splashed forth everywhere. The Kohinoor Diamond now belonged to England and her queen. The Punjab Empire was defunct, and its eleven-year-old Maharajah Dalip Singh, was escorted from his home, never to return again.
The Mountain of Light begins in 1817, some thirty years before the British get the Kohinoor, with the king of Afghanistan seeking refuge in the Punjab and its then-ruler, Dalip’s father Maharajah Ranjit Singh. He’s given sanctuary on one condition—he has to give the Kohinoor to Ranjit Singh in return.
As the years pass, a British Governor-General visits the court of Ranjit Singh, his sisters admire the Kohinoor, and one of them falls in love with Ranjit’s Italian general. And then, Ranjit dies, and the British take over the Punjab lands, nominally for now, until the young heir Dalip reaches his sixteen years of age.
But, things don’t quite work out the way they were planned, and the British annex the Punjab Empire, divest Dalip of his title, his lands, the wealth of his treasury and his Kohinoor diamond.
The young Maharajah is put under the guardianship of various British officials and their wives, taught English, and brought up to become a perfect English gentleman. Dalip travels to England when he is sixteen years old—when he was to have originally attained his majority and ruled over his Punjab himself—and meets Queen Victoria. He is feted and petted there, given privileges, a large income…but, he begins to realize just what he has lost. It’s not enough. Nothing can compensate for the fact that he is no longer an independent king, no longer rules over an empire that is rightfully his and that he no longer owns that gorgeous diamond called the Kohinoor—the name of which comes from the Persian for ‘a mountain of light.’
Indu Sundaresan’s sixth work of fiction, The Mountain of Light, is a brilliant tale of love, adventure, loss, and betrayal, wrapped around the glowing heart of one of the world’s most famous diamonds.
