Koh-i-Noor is well-known. There are several more Indian treasures in the British Royal Collection

One of the earliest Hindustani words to enter the English lexicon was loot. William Dalrymple in his 2019 book, The Anarchy, brings to life the humongous asset-stripping indulged in by the directors and officers of the East India Company. Now, with the coronation of King Charles III just weeks away, British press have begun probing the “dubious origins” of the Royal family’s wealth.

King Charles’s mother Queen Elizabeth had chosen a platinum necklace set with 300 diamonds as her wedding gift in 1947 from the Nizam of Hyderabad. The Nizam had instructed Cartier in London that the Princess should select the gift herself and the bill would be taken care of by him. Her picture with the Nizam of Hyderabad necklace was on postage stamps from 1953 until 1971.

But not all gifts and artefacts in the Royal Collection have such a clear provenance. The story of the Koh-i-noor diamond is one of the most famous and oft repeated. It is difficult to put a figure on how many such jewellery items could be in the Royal Collection, but clearly attempts are being made by historians, independent experts and indeed the Royal family itself to put out information in varying degrees.

A recent article in The Guardian has pointed out that a gold girdle, said to be one of King Charles’s favourite items, was acquired by the East India company when they took over Punjab from the minor prince Duleep Singh in 1849. It was during the same time that the Kohinoor was shipped to London. However, the Royal Collection Trust website does provide the provenance of this gold girdle with 19 hexagonal and rectangular emeralds.

It seems that Queen Victoria became besotted by the jewellery and artefacts that the East India Company got upon the annexation of Punjab. They were displayed at the Great Exhibition in 1851, after which quite a few of them were presented to Queen Victoria, including the gold girdle. It does note that it was made for Maharaja Sher Singh around 1840 with emeralds inherited from Ranjit Singh and taken as part of the Lahore treasury (the words loot, stolen or plundered are not used) in 1849 and ultimately gifted to the Queen in 1851.

Generations later the girdle survived to become one of King Charles’s favourite items, because to the utter dismay of Queen Victoria, the emeralds and the flat-cut diamonds in the girdle couldn’t be re-used as they were too thin. Originally, the girdle was used by Ranjit Singh to decorate his horse harnesses and is now housed in the Windsor Castle.

The problem is that for the Royal Collection, which is one the largest with millions of items collected by virtue of a global empire, it was just not possible, or was not deemed necessary, to have records or details of every item. And lack of details could mean that it was perhaps acquired in not so correct circumstances. Consider a beautiful circular gold necklace, enamelled blue with two rows of diamonds encircling a ruby in the Royal Collection. It is only recorded as “possibly acquired by Queen Mary”, King Charles’s great-grandmother, with the item originating in Bikaner.

In several cases, different items of jewellery gifted to the Royal family were combined to get a stunning or a far sturdier piece. In one such instance, the services of Phillips Brothers & Sons were used to make a necklace using gemstones from a necklace given by the Maharaja of Gwalior and a ring gifted by the Maharaja of Mysore.

In 1875-76, King Edward VII, when he was the Prince of Wales, toured India during which he met close to 100 rulers. He exchanged gifts with each of them and the items he collected were so large and impressive that they were exhibited in Britain and Europe. But museum-goers and wider public are now increasingly interested in knowing the backstories of the items they see on display in Europe and the UK.

The royal family is aware of the increasing clamour to return stolen, looted artefacts, but the first step towards that is proper cataloguing, and complete disclosure of what is in their possession. In 2017, the Royal estates were controversially granted exemption from a law that sought to protect the world’s cultural property. This meant that royal palaces – Balmoral, Windsor, Sandringham – could not be subject to police searches.

However, museums in the UK and elsewhere have slowly opened to the prospect of returning items which were taken forcefully, plundered, or are gifts of illicit antiquities. In the case of the UK, there are demands from countries around the world to return artefacts that should rightly belong to their home countries.

When the future of the India House, the headquarters of the East India Company, came under threat in the late 1870s, the collections it held were transferred to the Victoria and Albert Museum. After the 1857 war of independence, the Crown had replaced the East India Company as the ruler in the Indian sub-continent and continued to benefit from the largesse that came its way due to victories in the battlefield or extinction of a minor principality.

It was only decades after Independence that greater details of the items taken from India and kept in hundreds of museums littered around England started to come out. In the early 1990s the V&A came up with the over 30,000 Indian artefacts that were languishing in their basements to be put on display. The erstwhile Indian Religions Room and the Buddhist Room in the British Museum housed several artefacts from the medieval period which included Jain, Buddhist, and Brahmanic sculptures.

So enormous was the collection from the sub-continent that as early as the last decades of the nineteenth century, there were plans to have a great Indian Museum in London, with the cost to be borne by the Indian taxpayer! It didn’t materialize. Around the same period, the shenanigans in Ireland that an English land agent named Charles Boycott heaped on the locals galvanized them to ostracize him, thus giving the English language a new term - boycott, which actually saw one of its strongest manifestations in colonial India to ultimately drive out the Raj.