Kohinoor, the Indian diamond that sits in the British royal crown, is world-renowned.Every connoisseur of gems and jewellery would know about it.
But the story of its little cousin, Bala Kohinoor, is shrouded in secrecy.
The origin of Bala Kohinoor is unknown, though it was believed to have been mined from Golconda diamond mines in what is now coastal Andhra
Pradesh. The story of Bala Kohinoor begins in the 1820s, when a goldsmith discovered it lying at a buried earthen pipkin at Narkola (possibly Narkhoda)
near Shamshabad on the way to Matkal (Makhtal). Some accounts described it as larger than a pigeon's egg in size.
The goldsmith, with the intent to sell it, broke the Bala Kohinoor into three pieces. The largest was half of the original diamond or 344 carats, while a smaller part was sold for Rs 70,000 ($1.8 million or Rs 14 crore in 2023) to Raja Chandu Lal, the prime minister of the fourth Nizam, Nasir-udDaulah. The larger part of the diamond was deposited in the royal treasury.
Isabel Burton, who travelled to Hyderabad over 150 years ago, wrote in his book, ‘Arabia, Egypt and India - A Narrative of Travels’: “The stone is said to
be of the finest water... The face is slightly convex, and the cleavage plane, produced by the fracture, is nearly flat, with a curious slope or groove beginning at the apex. The general appearance is an imperfect oval, with only one projection which will require the saw. It is not unlike a Chinese woman’s foot without the toes, and it will easily cut into a splendid brilliant, larger and more valuable than the present Kohinoor.”
“I can hardly wonder at this stone being ignored in England and in India, when little is known about it at Hyderabad. No one could tell me its weight in
grains or carats. The highest authority in the land vaguely said ‘about two ounces or 300 carats’,” Burton wrote.
In the 1850s, the Nizam, Nasir-ud-Daulah, got Bala Kohinoor sent to the Museum of Economic Geology in Calcutta, where its curator, Henry Piddington, measured it to be a whopping 277 carats. The gem was finally cut into the shape of an octahedron or the eight-faced diamond in the early 1920s by the order of the Nizam.
A few decades later, in 1944, news about Bala Kohinoor came to the fore when the British's India Office, in London, forwarded to the seventh Nizam a
request from G.F. Herbert Smith, the president of the Gemological Association of Great Britain, seeking more details about the Nizam’s precious possession.
The Nizam refused to honour the request, stating that the diamond was a sacred trust in his possession and that it cannot be shown to anybody.
Many, however, believe that Nizam refused to let the British gemologist see Bala Kohinoor because it was sold for more than $700,000 after it was cut in
the 1920s — following World War-I — to settle his debts. But no evidence exists about its purported sale. The inflation-adjusted value of $700,000 of the 1920s would be $12,134,520 or approximately Rs 100 crore in 2023, without considering its heritage value.
For the next 75 years, there was no trace of Bala Kohinoor. But in March 2019, the diamond emerged from secrecy at Siegelson, the prominent New
York gallery, as the ‘Nizam Diamond’, sending the entire jewellery industry into a flutter. Bala Kohinoor, according to reports, now weighs 120.8
carats — less than half of its size when it came into the possession of the Nizam.
It now has an irregular pear shape and reflects the typical old Indian
diamond cut. However, it lies in the chest of an unknown billionaire in the West, like lakhs of Indian artefacts, thousands of miles away from the homeland.
