Let the Koh-i-Noor haunt the crown, Zohran

The young and dynamic mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, a maestro of vertical video, when asked what he would say to visiting British monarch King Charles, said, “If I were to speak to the king, I would probably encourage him to return the Koh-i-Noor diamond.”

King Charles was in NYC recently to honour the 9/11 victims a few blocks from City Hall. Critics instantly pointed out that Mamdani was using this occasion as an opportunity for a freshman barb on colonialism and implying that this crown jewel belongs to India.

Others questioned Mamdani’s standing to demand the diamond — has he self-appointed himself as a representative of India’s government? Nicole Gelinas, contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, criticised the mayor’s rudeness and his tone and demeanour and said Mamdani did his best version of a petulant teen betraying intolerable boredom — on Wednesday, Mamdani made himself look small.

Indeed, serving as mayor of a city with so much global history is a big job – it is not all day care and cheap eggs. Zohran is not the first to demand that the diamond be returned to India, though. The demand was made by India 70 years ago and more recently voiced by a collection of Bollywood stars and businessmen pressing the British government in 2015 to return the stolen jewel on the same legal basis as art looted by the Nazis during the Second World War. Estimated to be worth 100 million British pounds, successive British prime ministers have stared down India’s standing request.

It has been the subject of myth and intrigue ever since.

No wonder Zohran made this demand, as he was raised by his academic father Mahmood Mamdani, where the conversation always focused on dispossession, expulsion, being treated as non-indigenous, and being treated as alien. According to Hisham Aidi, a political scientist at Columbia University whose supervisor was Professor Mamdani, that was the colonial construct from the beginning; that is Mahmood’s life’s work, and Zohran grew up with that.

Renowned writer Amitav Ghosh, who has consistently problematised the impacts of colonialism in his fiction writing, said that he knew his mayor [Zohran Mamdani] as a boy: “I’ve known since he was a kid.” Ghosh is a close friend of Mira Nair, mother of Zohran, and they both went to college together in New Delhi. Ghosh recalls that the Indian American community in New York City knew that Zohran was charismatic. He spoke well. He’s got that killer smile. “What really surprised me,” Ghosh said, “though, is how competent he is-- Every day he unveils some new thing. In our circles, it’s so rare for anyone to go into retail politics. I never would have guessed he’d turn out to be a political phenomenon – a genius, in a way. He just hits such a chord with young people.”

Mamdani, with his latest comments, has again shifted attention from the pomp and circumstance of a calculated royal visit to the unsettled question of the Koh-i-Noor’s ownership and Britain’s colonial legacy. Certain events in history ought to serve as grim reminders to humanity never to go on that path again. By doing so, humanity must perpetually remind itself of the extreme cruelty, pain, exploitation and suffering of the past inflicted by fellow humans on one another.

Such pit stops of history are necessary pauses as we race ahead to conquer new worlds and new planets with artificial intelligence, science and technology. Is humanity moving forward with equal speed and determination to create a better, kinder, more humane, spiritually elevated and environmentally safe world for our children and future generations?

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in Japan, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and The Partition Museum at Amritsar, India, are among the memorials better rested in the past. More than an estimated one million Hindus and Muslims were killed in the 1947 Partition violence that led to the creation of Pakistan. That legacy of the British Colonial Raj continues to wreak havoc even today as Indians and Pakistanis have become sworn enemies of each other with nuclear weapons at their fingertips. The peace and prosperity of the entire South Asian region have been held hostage by this conflict for more than seven decades now.

Alex Haley’s Roots is one such marker of what the slave trade of America did to the people of Africa. The most serious conflicts in the world today can be traced to those 300 years of colonial history—17th to 20th centuries-- when borders and maps were redrawn and new nations created. Sadly, both Israel and Palestine are victims of this legacy of British colonialism.

However, we dare add that in the majority of present-day Indians, we would humbly disagree with Mayor Mamdani and pretty much opine that let the Koh-i-Noor be rather retained by Britain as a shining symbol of their loot, plunder and murder of natives and their uncivilised greed as a shame of their horrific past, and let it continue to sit on the British monarch’s head. Yes, we Indians certainly don’t want it back. You can have it. Thank you so much, Your Majesty!

In fact, the symbol of the Koh-i-Noor should inspire us to work towards a global reset that the world needs desperately today.

(The writers are former journalists)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.