Kommareddi Family Lecture Series: Dr. Siddhartha V. Shah

Jewels have long played an essential role in fashioning the auspicious Indian body, as evidenced even in the earliest art excavated on the subcontinent. In the Indian context, the ideal body—full of vigor and beauty—is always the body adorned and it is, in particular, the royal male body that is most heavily ornamented in jewels. The importance of jewels in styling monarchical power in India was a point of severe criticism and judgment from the British during their extended rule over the subcontinent while they also appropriated the practice for their own imperial aims, especially in the final decades of the British Raj. This talk examines the importance of fashion and jewelry in styling imperial power, with an emphasis on the famed Koh-i-Noor diamond that is now a part of the British Crown Jewels. The presentation examines the display and treatment of the legendary jewel since it was “given” to Queen Victoria, the role of jewelry in shaping colonial fantasies about a weak and subordinate Indian masculinity, and ongoing considerations about what jewelry says about power, value, and identity.