The Afterlife of a Golconda Diamond

In a 1934 portrait by Bernard Boutet de Monvel, Maharani Sanyogitabai of Indore stands elegant and aloof, wearing an extraordinary necklace: a sautoir of platinum by Mauboussin, strung with a 23.24-carat blue diamond and flanked by two 40-carat pear-shaped stones now known as the Indore Pears. The blue diamond, unnamed then, would come to be called the Golconda Blue—a label retrofitted by provenance.

This is the strange afterlife of princely India. The diamonds once worn in the privacy of palace drawing rooms are now priced in USD and described in auction catalogues in forensic language. The Indore Blue, had it gone under the hammer estimated to fetch over $50 million at an upcoming Christie’s auction—but it was suddenly withdrawn at the request of the consignor.

The stone had been mined centuries earlier in Golconda. Golconda was not a single mine, not even a mine exactly, but an entire geography of sedimentary chance: a belt of alluvial diamond fields stretching through the Godavari–Krishna delta, now mostly lost to time, flood, and asphalt. Its name, derived from Golla Konda—shepherd’s hill—once referred to a 16th-century fort city west of Hyderabad, ruled successively by the Kakatiyas, the Bahmani Sultans, and finally the Qutb Shahis, whose Persianate court turned stone into story.

The mines themselves—Kollur, Ramallakota, Paritala, Banganapalle—employed thousands of labourers, slaves, water-drawers, brokers, tax agents, diggers, pickers, sifters, children. There were no safety regulations. There were no helmets. There were only deposits so rich that the soil shimmered. Tavernier, the French gem merchant who visited in the 17th century, reported that diamonds were found not in deep shafts, but in shallow pits, sometimes less than two feet deep, “with such ease and abundance that even children were seen picking them out”.

But it wasn’t the ease that made Golconda mythic. It was the purity. Many of the famed Golconda diamonds are type IIa or IIb—essentially nitrogen-free, structurally perfect, and, in the rare blue specimens, infused with trace boron. They seem lit from within. These are the diamonds that once made kings believe they were looking at God.

The Mughals were drawn to this light. Akbar’s treasury records list diamonds as a separate column, distinct from rubies, pearls, or emeralds. They were not simply adornment. They were talisman, tax base, and instruments of eternity. Shah Jahan wore the Koh-i-Noor as an eye-stone in his peacock throne. Later, it would be possessed by Durranis, Sikhs, British agents, and eventually the British Crown. Aurangzeb kept the Great Mogul in a turban twist. When Nader Shah of Persia sacked Delhi in 1739, the diamonds left too—some cut, some renamed, some disappeared. But the light travelled.

From the Mughals, Golconda diamonds passed into European hands via Armenian merchants, Dutch traders, and colonial brokers. Every great Western crown now holds at least one former Golconda stone: the Regent in the Louvre, the Orlov in the Kremlin, the Hope in Washington. There is a list—unofficial, incomplete, and often speculative—that traces at least 35 historically documented Golconda diamonds to modern owners. None are in India.

The Holkars of Indore rose to power in the 18th century, Maratha chieftains elevated by alliance, land grants, and calibrated loyalty to the British Raj. But by the early 20th century, the Holkars had become modernisers. Yeshwant Rao Holkar II, educated in England, photographed by Man Ray, corresponded with Le Corbusier, and, famously, commissioned the Manik Bagh palace from German architect Eckart Muthesius—a palace that looked less like a royal residence and more like a Bauhaus thought experiment in the tropics. The Holkars are mostly gone now. Manik Bagh was auctioned off in Paris in 1980. Sanyogitabai died young, of complications from surgery, at 23. The necklace was broken up. The Indore Pears were sold in Geneva in 1987. The blue diamond—its setting long removed—surfaced, briefly, in a private collection, and then re-entered auction channels. And now it is gone again.

Golconda stopped yielding diamonds sometime in the mid-18th century. Brazil took over. Then South Africa. The Indian market dried up. The colonial government passed laws regulating mining leases, but nobody came. By 1900, Golconda was a fort with no stones. By 1950, it was a tourist site with no memory. The stones survived, but not the story.

The Golconda Blue is one of the last diamonds that still carries that full chain of narrative weight: geological purity, royal use, documented origin, stylistic lineage. But it has left the visible economy.

Bernard Boutet de MonvelChristie’s auctionGolconda DiamondIndoreMaharani Sanyogitabainew briefWeb ExclusiveYeshwant Rao Holkar II