The Black Prince: A new film brings the story of Punjab's last king, Maharaja Duleep Singh, to life

The Black Prince: A new film brings the story of Punjab's last king, Maharaja Duleep Singh, to life

'On 29 March 1849, the ten-year-old Maharaja of Punjab, Duleep Singh, was ushered into the Shish Mahal, the magnificent mirrored throne room at the centre of the great fort of Lahore. The boy's father, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, was long dead, and his mother, Rani Jindan, had been forcibly removed some time earlier, and incarcerated in a palace outside the city. Now Duleep Singh found himself surrounded by a group of grave-looking men, wearing red coats and plumed hats, who talked among themselves in an unfamiliar language. In the terrors of the minutes that followed — what he later remembered as the 'crimson day' — the frightened but dignified child finally yielded to months of British pressure. Within minutes, the flag of the Sikh Khalsa was lowered and the British colours run up above the gatehouse of the fort.

The document signed by the ten-year-old maharaja, later known as the Treaty of Lahore, handed over to a private corporation, the East India Company, great swathes of the richest land in India... At the same time, Duleep Singh was induced to hand over to Queen Victoria the single most valuable object not just in Punjab, but arguably in the entire sub-continent: the celebrated Koh-i-Noor, or Mountain of Light.' In their telling of the sweeping story of the 'most infamous diamond in the world' (published by Juggernaut Books in December 2016), William Dalrymple and Anita Anand recounted the moment that the Koh-i-Noor passed out of Indian hands into English ones. While nearly every royal owner of the diamond seems to have attracted more than their fair share of misfortune, ill luck, illness, and death, the story of Maharaja Duleep Singh — the last king of Punjab, and the Koh-i-Noor's last Indian owner, seems particularly poignant. Unlike some of the gem's previous owners, Duleep Singh was neither maimed, nor tortured, nor even killed. But in his lifetime, he experienced a tremendous amount of loss.