William Drimple

And me, William Drimple.

We don't often get to do emergency pods, unlike our colleagues in current affairs, but suddenly colonialism is all the rage.

Suddenly, the empire has turned into a current affairs program.

And sure enough, this is the first time...

Well, one element of the story begins.

The story of the curse begins, I think, with something called the Symantica Gem, which

which is the mythical gem in the Bhagavad Purana, part of the Hindu scriptures, which causes havoc in its wake.

It kind of frames Krishna.

Krishna at one point is blamed for various killings and thefts associated with this gem.

And he eventually has to go into the desert, not the desert, he has to go into the jungle to clear his name.

And there is this old tradition in Indian gemology that diamonds are cursed, that there are gems which are lucky, but diamonds are not among them.

And diamonds, in fact, can be, if flawed and if not completely perfect, they can bring incredible bad luck to people.

So there's an ancient Indian tradition

belief system behind this story.

But it has to be said that this particular gem has left in reality, in history, an astonishing sort of torrent of blood in its wake.

Exactly.

In a sense, there's two different versions of the story.

There is the legend of the Koh-i-Noor, a lot of which was put together by one man.

And I actually ended up finding the document, the very first document written in English by a colonial official called Theo Metcalfe.

who was interested in gems and, in fact, got in trouble later for purloining them during the aftermath of 1857.