S. M. Tagore’s Maṇimālā and the meanings of diamonds in late Victorian Britain and India

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Notes

1 The original transliteration of the title is Mani-Málá; here I have used Maṇimālā to bring it in line with the transliteration conventions of Sanskrit scholars today. In this same logic Purána has been changed to Purāna and Syamantaka to Syāmantaka.

2 I am grateful to Regina Hoefer for making this point to me.

3 Compare, for example, King’s discussion of Indian diamonds from 1867 (39–60) with Streeter’s from 1877 (75–95, 188–131). Streeter alphabetized his discussion subheadings so that “African diamonds” would come before “Indian diamonds”. A discussion of Brazilian and Australian diamonds falls outside the scope of this paper but these locales of the diamond trade also complicated British diamond discourse in the 1870s.

4 The majority of the “translated” section of the diamond chapter was pulled from the Garudapurāna, with snippets from the Agnipurāna, Anandakanda, Dhundhukanatha Rasendracintamani, and Nityanathasiddha Rasarathna, or another shared source. I am grateful to Gerjan Altenburg for identifying these texts for me and discussing transliteration and the difference between being a translator versus a textual borrower. Tagore referenced specific texts in some places and was very vague about source material in others.

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Danielle Kinsey

Danielle Kinsey is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She specializes in nineteenth-century Britain and empire and has written articles on the Koh-i-Noor diamond (Journal of British Studies), diamond and gold mining (Atlantic Studies), and British attitudes towards Illicit Diamond Buying (Historical Reflections). She is currently completing a monograph on diamonds and the diamond trade in Britain in the nineteenth century.