During the much-ballyhooed visit of King Charles and Queen Camilla to New York City on Wednesday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani called on the King to use his power to return the Koh-i-Noor Diamond to India.
As reported by Reuters, at a press conference before a ceremony to commemorate the victims of the September 11 attack, Mamdani said, “If I were to speak to the king separately from that, I would probably encourage him to return the Koh-i-Noor Diamond.”
The two leaders did in fact meet later at the ceremony itself, but Buckingham Palace declined to comment and Mamdani’s office did not respond to a request for comment about what was discussed.
In 1850, the Koh-i-Noor Diamond was given to Queen Victoria after Britain’s colonial governor-general arranged for the exchange of a treasure that had belonged to a deposed Indian leader. The diamond has since come to be seen as a symbol of colonial British rule by many Indians.
A story about Mamdani’s comment in the New York Times noted “The Koh-i-Noor, which means ‘mountain of light’ in Persian, is one of the largest cut diamonds in the world, at 105.6 carats and about the size of a chicken’s egg. Historians believe it was sifted from the sands in southern India thousands of years ago. It changed hands over the centuries in conquests across the Indian subcontinent.”
William Dalrymple, a co-author of the 2017 book Koh-I-Noor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond, told the Times: “It has a long history of bringing bad luck and, again, seems to have been the tripwire which tripped up King Charles on his trip to New York.”
Priya Darsan Pattnaik, a Hindu activist who filed a lawsuit last year with the International Court of Justice calling for the diamond’s return, added, “I am amazed to hear that Zohran Mamdani raised this issue. We should make efforts to bring back the Koh-i-Noor.”
