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Chasing the Mountain of Light: Across India on the Trail of the Koh-i-Noor Diamond, by Kevin Rushby
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The Koh-i-Noor diamond known as the Mountain of Light, the world's largest diamond, was found in India, traveled from Golconda to the Mughal palaces in the north. Fought over, cursed at and occasionally lost, it finally reached the Sikhs in the Punjab, only to be seized by British agents eager to please young Queen Victoria. It now lies in the Tower of London where some say its curse controls the fate of the Windsor family. In Chasing the Mountain of Light, Kevin Rushby pursues the dramatic career of the Koh-i-Noor on a journey to the heart of Indian culture meeting dealers, smugglers, and petty crooks along the way. It's another adventure from Rushby whom the Washington Post recently compared to William S. Burroughs and Arthur Rimbaud.
- Sales Rank: #3374141 in Books
- Color: Blue
- Published on: 2001-06-02
- Released on: 2001-06-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .62" w x 6.00" l, .88 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 272 pages
Amazon.com Review
A shiny piece of carbon is what ensnares writer Kevin Rushby, luring him into a strange world of hidden towns with no names, a land of charms, chakras, cardamom, and missing gem mines. But it's not just any chunk of glittering jewel with which Rushby is obsessed: he's pursuing the history of the Koh-I-Noor diamond, a 106-karat piece of crystalline perfection now part of England's Crown Jewels. Research pulls him across India and into a diverse culture that is so exotic--and simultaneously so mystical, esoteric, and often criminal--that he may as well have fallen into Middle-earth.
The diamond now sits in the Tower of London, but the magnificent gem's past proves elusive, its light flickering in a maze of mirrors, cloaked in myth, lies, and mystery. The truth about whence it came and which palms it crossed may ultimately never be uncovered. Nevertheless, Rushby artfully uses the pretext to uncover rich stories: of the excesses of wealthy jewelers, of impoverished farmers who discover gleaming wealth in the fields, and of clandestine diamond markets, where cloth-wrapped baubles are sold on the streets like peddled crack.
Names of Indian places and people do get confusing--and there are more characters spinning around in this book than a Russian novel--but that doesn't matter. Rushby weaves Chasing the Mountain of Light with lush detail, creating a tale as compelling, multifaceted, and breathtaking as the diamond itself. --Melissa Rossi
From Publishers Weekly
Rushby's interest in the ancient diamond trade was piqued after a chance meeting with a diamond smuggler in Ethiopia. Driven to unearth the history-drenched underbelly of the diamond trade, Rushby (Eating the Flowers of Paradise: A Journey Through the Drug Fields of Ethiopia and Yemen) treks across India in search of old gemstone mines and ancient accounts. Rushby isn't quite sure what he's looking for, but he narrows his focus to the fate of Koh-i-Noor, the world's largest diamond, from its origins circa 1000 B.C., when it was believed to be a gift from the Sun God, to its present home in the Tower of London. He seeks out unorthodox storytellers, be they miners, peasants, gem dealers, diplomats, gurus or Jesuit priests. Unfortunately, Rushby is limited to the stories told by those who speak English; he very eloquently describes the frustration of watching someone gesture and talk excitedly, only to receive a two-word translation from a jaded interpreter. However, Rushby's keen sense of humor and sharp eye more than compensate for this handicap. Acutely written, this meandering adventure will appeal equally to mystics, gemologists, historians and travelers. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In some circles, gems--like the Koh-i-Noor diamond--are believed to influence people for good or ill. Now in the possession of the British Crown, that legendary Indian diamond has been coveted and fought over through the centuries. Here, Rushby (Eating the Flowers of Paradise) tours the subcontinent in order to trace the diamond's blood-splattered history. He visits diamond mines in Andhra Pradesh, Bombay and Gujarat, and Delhi and the Punjab; stops at roach-infested hotels; travels by bus and train; and gets robbed by diamond smugglers. Whether you agree with Rushby that the accursed diamond should not be returned to its lawful owners (India) is beside the point. This travelog--as spellbinding as any thriller--contains some brilliant portrayals of ex-princes, scholars, cranks, and other sundry characters whose hospitality Rushby enjoys. Highly recommended for public libraries.
-Ravi Shenoy, Hinsdale P.L., IL
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting and enjoyable travelogue of India
By Tim F. Martin
_Chasing the Mountain of Light_ by Kevin Rushby is an interesting and sometimes humorous travelogue about India, ostensibly about the author's efforts to track the origins and history of the Koh-i-Noor or Mountain of Light, one of the most famous diamonds in the world, from its origins in the mines of Golconda in southern India to centuries later and its presumably final resting place in the Tower of London. Though the diamond's history and lore was indeed chronicled, the book was really the story of one traveler's adventures and encounters throughout India. Journeying from Madras on the Coromandel Coast in southern India all the way north to Amritsar in the Punjab, near the Pakistani border, Rushby undertook an epic quest to find the origins of this stone and to relate its bloody history. He had to contend with reluctant, unfriendly, tight-lipped officials, shady sellers of black market diamonds in dangerous back alleys, eccentric but knowledgeable experts on diamond lore and Indian history, and thieves, alerted to Rushby's inquires about diamonds, thinking him not a writer but a man who actually possessed large quantities of these gems on his person.
The diamond known as Koh-i-Noor was believed by many devout Hindus to actually be mythic in origin, to be a stone that was once called the Syamantaka, a gem which the Hindu sun god Surya gave as reward to a worshipper. Later the god Krishna was accused by the people of stealing the gem and fought terrible battles to return the diamond back to humanity. The stone was owned by the Mughals for generations, beginning with the first Mughal emperor Babur in the 1520s, though many scholars dispute the notion that the Syamantaka and a magnificent stone known simply as "Babur's diamond" are the one and the same. The Persian invader Nadir Shah sacked Delhi in 1739, leaving the Mughals as vassals but along with many other treasures took the great diamond with him, giving it the name Koh-i-Noor (which means Mountain of Light). After Nadir Shah was assassinated in 1747 the Koh-i-Noor was taken by Ahmad Khan Abdali to Afghanistan. The last member of the Durrani dynasty (which was founded by Ahmad Khan Abdali), a ruler by the name of Shah Shuja, went into exile, the gem then taken by Ranjit Singh in 1813 (a man who founded a Sikh kingdom in the Punjab in 1799). During one of the Anglo-Sikh wars the Koh-i-Noor was captured by the British, who took the diamond to Queen Victoria, who in turn had the 186 carat diamond re-cut to improve its brilliance, bringing the stone down to a 108 carats (though strangely enough improving the diamond's allure, as the number 108 is a very auspicious number in India).
Many in India believe the stone is cursed and that the stone can only be given freely to another person by its owner or be won rightfully in battle; horrible things will result when the stone is bought, sold, or stolen. Further, they also believe that the stone will produce good fortune for good people but very bad things for the wicked.
Like many other great Indian diamonds, the Koh-i-Noor was always searching for a new master, "leaving behind the failed and the dead." Claimed by India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran, the Sikhs in particular are keen to retrieve it as a symbol of Sikh nationalism (though they insist that like their famed Golden Temple, it would be the property of all Indians). Given its history and the immense prestige that would be gained by any in the subcontinent or the region who came into possession of the stone, Rushby wondered if the diamond was not best left in the Tower of London.
As fascinating as the Koh-i-Noor was, its history fills a fairly modest part of the book. More interesting perhaps was the numerous encounters Rushby had. He toured Fort St. George in Madras, the largest building left in the world constructed by the East India Company; never a favored post by Englishman, many sent there never returned, often committing suicide or drinking themselves to death. Also in Madras the author visited an Armenian church and met a Mr. Gregory, the last remaining Armenian, sole representative of a once thriving Armenian trading community. Rushby met with astrogemologists, men who believed that they could control fate by the proper manipulation of gemstones. Religious encounters as one might imagine definitely occurred, as Rushby met with Zoroastrians who had fled from Aden, Yemen after the British left, observed a Sikh worship ceremony in the Golden Temple, and met a number of Jainists, going on a Jain pilgrimage and encountering members of both sects of the religion, both the Digambaras or "sky-clads," who believe that it is most holy to be without clothing, and the Svetambaras or "white-clads," who believe that nudity is not possible in an imperfect world. Rushby visited Alaung, the world's largest ship breaking yard, where tens of thousands of unskilled laborers work on an oil-soaked beach to destroy 50,000 tonne tankers with practically their bare hands. One of my favorite parts was his visit to Bilkha, once a tiny state that was only 7 miles wide and 10 miles long. Rushby met with the last descendents of its raja, a man with memories of a garage of Rolls-Royces, a stable of fine race horses and elephants, and lion-hunting expeditions, now a friendly and affable man sought by the locals for kindly advice, with only a single servant that he treats like a son, a man who took pleasure in personally fixing his own jeep and in participating in studies of the lions of the Gir Forest, no longer seeking them as trophies but working hard to conserve them for the future.
A good book, at the back of the book there was a helpful chronology of the diamond and a bibliography. Though there were two maps some of the places he visited were not noted on them.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Travel Writing at its Very Best
By A Lover of Good Books
This is not a book about diamonds. Instead it is the chronicle of a wonderful offbeat trip through India tracing the path that the Koh-i-noor diamond may have followed.
The author is that rarest and most estimable kind of travel writer who acts as the reader's eyes and ears. When Rushby describes a scene you see it, hear it, smell it and feel it. When he describes a conversation he captures the person's speech patterns, their personal idiosyncrasies, and makes them come alive. Unlike many other current travel writers, Rushby does not waste your time with pages about himself and his personal problems or his reactions to the people and places he visits. Instead, he gives you enough data so that you can make up your own mind about the poeple and places he describes.
And what fascinating places they are! Southern Indian haunts of small time diamond smugglers, the ruined palaces of Mughal emperors, the studies of eccentric professors, the shabby apartments of claiments to the wealth of deposed rajas. All these are there and more, as the author moves through a series of cheap hotels via questionable transport of the sort that the reader loves to hear about but is glad not to have to actually use.
This book reminded me a lot of Eric Hansen's Motoring with Mohammed, another of my favorite travel books. It's a definite "must read" for any serious armchair traveller!
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
much more than the history of diamonds is told....
By Eric McCalla
Kevin Rushby's trek across India in search of the legendary diamond, the "Koh-I-Noor" (mountain of light)is much more than a history of this fabled and "cursed" stone from the Golconda mine. Rushby's journey takes the reader through many small villages, many of them long abandoned after British rule.
Rushby's days in Gujarat state are the most interesting. There, he meets an old gentleman who lives in a large but very lonely estate home. They speak of the old days when the gentleman's estate was full of people, servants and animals. Now, his days are spent on the rooftop terrace taking tea in the afternoon and reminiscing about his past. A sense of melancholy and lost time is felt throughout all the varied characters' lives Rushby comes to know so well.
The story of the diamond trade and the wars fought over their inherent riches is only a small part of the book. The stories of the Indian people Rushby meets make this a great read for those of us who have not yet seen India. Time for me to book passage!
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