William Dalrymple is a Scottish historian and writer whose work has won, among other accolades, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Scottish Book of the Year Prize. His most recent book, Kohinoor: The Story of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond, co-authored with journalist and writer Anita Anand, dispels some of the myths surrounding the Kohinoor Diamond, and traces its history from the Mughal Empire to the British Raj. Dawn sat down with Mr Dalrymple when he visited Islamabad to launch Kohinoor, and spoke to him about his work.

Q: What was it like to trace the history of the subcontinent using this one object, the Kohinoor Diamond?

A: One of the ideas of the book is that it sews together an extraordinary amount of Indian culture just following one object. It was frustrating to find that all the early history which I had assumed had a basis in fact actually didn’t. Not a single historical reference to the stone is a 100pc certain before 1750. There are many references to large diamonds before that and some of them, including the Babar diamond, may be the Kohinoor but we don’t know.

Q: What was the research process like for the book?

A: Historians try to find primary sources and follow the trails till it stops. What we found was that the trail stopped with this document written in Delhi in 1849 by Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe, who made up the early history of the diamond from hearsay.

Some of it may be true - hearsay often contains grains of truth - but we did not know how much of it is true and how much was told in Chandni Chowk that particular morning by some jewel salesman who wanted to make up a nice story.

A more interesting find was a 1750 quote which had not been translated from Persian before. I went to the original Persian sources from the Nadir Shah period and found that the legend about the turban swap is not true and there is no evidence of Nadir Shah naming it the Kohinoor. So you peel away the myths and leave what you can substantiate as historical fact. It was exciting to find this document in the national archives which provided an answer to my question, which was, ‘Where’s all this rubbish coming from? Why can’t I find the original sources for this stuff?’ And then we found the reason, it only dates back to 1849.

We were able to write this book quickly because both of us have written a lot around the diamond earlier. My previous book Return of a King is about Shah Shuja and I went to Afghanistan to research, and with the aid of Ashraf Ghani, who was then chancellor of Kabul University, found four or five primary sources from that period.

A lot of them talked about the Kohinoor and the answer to how it went to Ahmed Shah Abdali, but were never translated from Persian before.

The trick I keep playing [for most of my books] is that there is such a rich Persian and Urdu historiography from this part of the world which very few people properly use. Using British sources is easier but though quite often fairly reliable, British sources tell one part of the story and tend to have been used by historians before me while the Persian stuff is new and rarely harvested.

Q: When David Cameron was asked about returning the Kohinoor, he said, ‘If you say yes to one you suddenly find the British Museum would be empty.’ What do you think that says about the relationship between colonialism and culture, both for the colonised and the colonisers?

A: I am Scot, so I feel I can see things from both perspectives and I am aware of the existence of a whole baggage of colonial horrors which are rarely recognised by the perpetrators.

I had a half Scottish and half Irish nanny who gave me my love of history. I remember she read me stories of the Irish potato famine and what the British did to the Irish, of women having to eat their children because they were starving to death and the horrors of the English after the 1745 rebellion. So being aware of the two contrasting narratives is in my DNA.

I have been living in this part of the world for 30 years now and I am sympathetic to the fact that a whole range of atrocities have barely been written about and are certainly not known in Britain. The British still blindly believe their empire was a benign thing in contrast to the French and Belgians.

There is far more postcolonial anger in India, but it is amazing that there isn’t more in both countries considering what the British did here. But there is increasingly in India.

In his book Inglorious Empire, Shashi Tharoor goes further that I would in that he is guilty of slightly whitewashing the pre-colonial past and presents this as an Eden when in fact there is an extremely violent history in this part of the world before and during colonialism. The horrors didn’t end with colonialism, and they didn’t start with it either.

I do believe there were some positive results from colonial rule and the fact that there is a unified country called India is partly due to that – democracy, various institutions of law – against which you have to weigh endless atrocities, the destruction of self-confidence, the destruction of culture.

One of the things that stopped British colonialism in India being as culturally disruptive as it might have been was the fact that so much of the land – a fifth of India – remained under princely states which maintained their darbaars, which meant maintaining bards, court singers, dancers, and so many of the institutions of culture survived in places like that while they died out in places like Bengal or UP, which were directly ruled. So the damage wasn’t as complete as it might have been.

Q: Does your book make an argument for the ownership of the Kohinoor?

A: We made it a point not to do that. So many people are [claiming the stone] and there is so little understanding of the facts of the case, we thought we would do it as neutrally as we can while wanting to write a fairly racy narrative.

We wanted to stick very closely to the facts and not write a polemical book so we don’t argue who it belongs to but we have laid out the casework in case anyone wants to claim it.

Published in Dawn, March 2nd, 2017