The Fire In The Ice

By Sudha Hariharan

Like any romantic tale, the story of diamonds starts with ’once upon a time….’ except that in this case, once upon a time was billions of years ago. That’s when the furnace of fire and lava helped transform plain, ordinary, old carbon into the hardest and most luminous of minerals---diamond crystals. All this took place in the cauldron of boiling magma deep , below the surface of the earth, later thrusting upwards to break through the surface of the earth and finally cool in kimberlite or lamproite ’pipes’. It is in these pipes that most diamonds are found.

Just what is it about these gems----which, in their rough state look like nothing more than candy crystals you make by hanging a string in a glass of sugar water---that provokes such passion? And it doesn’t stop at mere passion: murder and mayhem, legends and lust are all inextricably intermingled in the history of some of the more famous stones.

Both the Orloff and the Idol’s Eye were reputedly stolen from temples where they graced the statues of gods; legend also has it that the latter was also used by the Sheikh of Kashmir to ransom Princess Rasheetah, who’d been abducted by the Sultan of Turkey.

The Blue Hope, on the other hand, is the notorious star of a bad-luck saga that’s hard to beat. Once owned by Louis XIV of France, it was stolen during the French Revolution and turned up in London in 1830, where it was bought by one Philip Henry Hope( after whom it is named), whose entire family subsequently died in poverty. H stigma attached to this diamond didn’t deter Edward McLean, who was later struck by similar misfortune. The 45 carat diamond is now in the Smithsonian in Washington, an institution which luckily seems immune to the stone’s notorious jinx.

It’s not only the historical pieces that provoke over-the-top responses. Harry Winston, one of the biggest jewellers and diamond dealers in the world, and favourite of socialites and celebs worldwide, maintains it is impossible to sell his kind of jewellery unless one is passionate about women.

That’s all very well and one can imagine people getting worked up about big dramatic stones and pieces of jewellery with melodramatic histories. But what about ordinary people who can coo about someone else’s magnificent collection. Would one really enjoy being in Liz Taylor’s position when the late Richard Burton presented her with the 70-carat pear-shaped diamond(the Burton-Taylor)? It was so magnificent that insurers insisted she could only wear it 30 days a year, and that when she did,she must be escorted by a posse of bodyguards.

Our ancestors believed that diamonds were fragments of the stars ,and to own one would literally be to own something ‘from out of this world’. But what explains the modern yearning for these stones? A deep-seated atavistic instinct? Or could it be rarity value: not only the stones themselves, but the circumstances in which they are given and received? The glow a diamond gives the recipient is similar to how you feel when a friend or loved one goes to that extra trouble to track down your favourite flowers out of season. And it certainly lasts longer.

Make no mistake about it, although technology has enabled more diamonds to be uncovered than ever before, the demand for diamonds is also greater than ever. keeping the rarity value of the stones constant . Yes, that demand may be nurtured by clever advertising and marketing, but it still can’t explain that eternal attraction!

The very permanence of the stone----the hardness that made it so appealing in an earlier age, is even more attractive in an age of ‘here-today-gone-tomorrow fashions.’ The idea of possessing an immutable item of ‘real’ value has taken an almost mystical significance in our material world.

While price is not always a reliable indicator of value, with diamonds, the very real cost of production is frighteningly high. It takes an enormous amount of manpower and machinery to blast, dig, crush and sort the average 100 tonnes of ore needed to find a rough diamond that can be polished to a one-carat stone. It takes five carats to make up one gram--- and to extract five carats of rough diamonds more than 1,000 tonnes of rock must be dynamited, lifted, extracted and transported! This has been compared to ‘demolishing a building in order to find a shirt-button in the foundations’.

It is now known that the Hindus first discovered that diamonds could be used to cut diamonds—not surprising, as until the 18 Century the legendary Valley of the Volcanoes in India was the only known diamond-producing area in the world. For several hundred years generations of princes and maharajahs carried on a lasting love affair with diamonds. Today this has become an affair of finance as lakhs of cutters work for peanuts in Surat and Mumbai as cutters carving out 58 facets on a stone no bigger than a pin head.

Geometrical patterns of planes have been used in Europe since the 15^th Century, but the classic brilliant round cut (invented by the Venetian Peruzzi in the 17thCentury) remains one of the most popular throughout the world. Other cuts like marquise, straight side emerald-cut, pear shape and oval—all have 58 facets for maximum brilliance.

For five centuries the Pelikaan district in Antwerp has been known as the capital of cut stones. Diamond merchants toddle through the streets with small fortunes in briefcases chained to their wrists. The area is electronically monitored and dotted with police check-points. This is a far cry from what one sees in Mumbai’s Zaveri Bazaar where people move freely, crowds swirl and diamonds worth crores exchange hands each day.

Antwerp is also home to four of the 15 diamond bourses in the world—this is the place where negotiations take place, cutters come to sell their stones to merchants who will sell them to jewellers who, in turn, will sell them to you. Deals are made in confidence, no papers are signed and everyone knows everyone else.

Whether in the cutting, sorting, wheeling or dealing, for those caught up in this thrill, it is the ultimate family business.

For centuries these stones were reputed to make invincible anyone who wore them in battle, and despite obvious evidence to the contrary kings and princes decreed that only they might wear them. However over the past five centuries diamonds have become more associated with love than with war.

Probably the most important diamond for a woman is the one that graces her engagement finger---these days it represents a joint commitment. And while the ring is often bought together, more and more women here are now buying their own diamonds. In reaching for gender equality, the modern woman has come a long way.

Perhaps like our ancestors we find diamonds irresistible because we also see something of the stars in them….every stone you hold in your hand is another world!

WEIGHTY FACTS

No bit of knowledge is irrelevant if you are serious about damonds.Here are some weighty facts:

• Watch the scales and forget about chocolates…think carobs instead. The seeds of the carob tree all weigh the same and hence were used as handy weights on the scales of gem dealers in ancient times…that’s why diamonds are measured in carats, a corruption of ‘carobs’. A carat is one-fifth of a gram. Each carat is divided into 100 points.
• A single 2-carat diamond is worth more than twice as much as two one –carat stones of the same quality. Only one diamond in a million weighs more than 1 carat.

(The Cullinan, the largest diamond ever discovered weighed 700 gms originally. However it was cut into 9 major stones, two of which are in the British Crown Jewels and 96 smaller ones).

• Until the 15^th Century, only kings wore them as a symbol of macho strength, courage and invincibility. The Archduke Maxmillion of Austria presented a diamond engagement ring to Princess Mary of Burgundy and women have been wearing them ever since….a million thanks Max!!
• Cupid’s arrows were reportedly tipped with diamonds…to pierce the hardest of hearts perhaps.
• The early Egyptians believed that the vena amoris ( vein of love) ran directly from the heart to the top of the third finger on the left hand…engagement and wedding rings are probably worn on this finger because of this.
• Diamonds are poor conductors of electricity---except of the emotional kind . Their melting point is at least 2.5 times greater than that of steel. are signed and everyone knows everyone else.rchants who will sell them to jewellers
• The word diamond comes from the Greek’adamas’ meaning unconquerable
• The finest colour for aor invincibleGreekty---except of the emotional kind and their melting point is at least 2.5 times greater diamond is no colour at all, but if you fancy a bit of colour, it doesn’t come cheap.
• Coloured diamonds, which are fast becoming popular in India, are also called ‘fancies’ in amber, blue, brown,cinnamon, champagne, green,pink, yellow and even black.
• Like wood diamonds have a grain along which cleaving has to be done—some can be cleaved by hand but this requires great skill.The facets (even when there are 58) are ground one by one. That’s what gives the stone its unmatched brilliance.

The Children that Cut Our Diamonds

Cut diamonds have been India's major export for more than a decade. Because of its low wages, India has been a powerhouse driving the profits of the diamond industry sky high. Here it is that most of the glitter of the diamond world is created. The major Indian diamond merchants are today merchantile princes with offices in all major international diamond centres. In 1993, India exported 12.5 million carats worth officially US$ 3,444 million.

When the Chairman of the Central Selling Organisation (CSO) and deputy chairman of De Beers, Nicky Oppenheimer, came to India for the first time in February 1994, accompanied by Anthony Oppenheimer, the president of the CSO, and Garry Ralf, the managing director of the CSO, he spoke in a tribute to India's service to the CSO of how India was now first in the world both in terms of the value and of the weight of diamonds processed having now surpassed Israel - a country that dominated in the 1970s and the early 1980s. In 1993 Israel exported US$2,500 million dollars' worth of cut diamonds, some billion dollars less than India. Israel's cut diamond exports were made up of far fewer stones since on average its diamonds were worth US$817 a carat, much more than India's US$219. iii

The Oppenheimer cartel directly or indirectly controls the supply of rough diamonds to India. In general the better stones are provided to European or American merchants, the machine cuttable to Israel and the rest to Indian. It channels diamonds through a few favoured Indian merchants as this helps it maintain control. About 10 Indian families controlled India's entire output in 1992 and they were scarcely taxed at all. The rise of these families in the past 15 years has been one of the most significant changes in the diamond world. These Indian diamond merchant princes are now powerful in the diamond markets of Antwerp and New York and even in Tel Aviv.

In India De Beers is said to monitor the Indian trade through a company called Hindustan Diamonds. Two Indian generals on the board of a De Beers' related company in India, Hindustan Diamonds, when asked what their company had done about the living conditions of the diamond cutter, confessed that the living conditons were very poor, they said they wanted them to improve, but, they asked, what could they do?

The diamond merchants of Bombay that control the Indian diamond trade do not cut diamonds themselves. That job is reserved to Patels who worked until comparatively recently as agricultural workers in the state of Gujarat. The workshops that employ them receive the uncut diamonds on a piece-work basis from a distributor working on a commission for the merchant. A few are processed in larger factories. Most go to be cut in Surat north of Bombay.

Surat is one of the most polluted cities---its factories belch smoke as if there is no tomorrow. The roads in the centre of the town are lined with shanties of flimsy construction, impoverished but often scrupulously clean inside. These are the home of workers who have abandoned parched lands in the north for work in the city. Many diamond cutters were recruited as sharp eyed children and brought to the city by travelling agents going from village to village. Child labour is illegal in India but young eyes are much prized in the diamond trade. India gets all the really small diamonds to cut and these demand the keenest of eyes.the smallest cut fiamonds are no more than a speck of light..these are half-pointers. There are 100 points to a carat. A carat is one fifth of a gram. These diamonds therefore weighted one thousandth of a gram. Each of them had been cut with about 50 sides.

Tim Capon, a director of De Beers Centenary, justified the high prices charged for diamonds by saying that, among other factors, the polishing of them : 'requires skills of a very high order.' But it is a shame that the cutters are not paid enough to justify even moderate prices in the jewellers' shops.

'Diamond Nagir’ is situated on the outskirts of Surat, surrounded by high walls protected by para-military guards. The workers live, work, eat and sleep in or by the plant with several blocks of . flats serving as worker's living quarters.. The factory rooms are large, ventilated, although with no provision for filtering out the pervasive dust of ground diamonds. The numbers of females working here is unusual. Mostly it is males who cut. None of the cutters seem to have past their twenties - and manyare much much younger, clearly far below the legal age. Some were under 10. In the evenings the dusk reveals countless windows lit by long neon tubes slung low over the cutting wheels. Each workshop houses from 3 to 5 cutting tables or 'ghantis'. . Each ghanti has 4 or 5 workers squatting around it, each cutting on his (rarely her) segment of the cutting wheel The ghanti is a 'scaife', or horizontal rotating cutting wheel, driven by a motorised belt. These belts were the source of many accidents as they were unguarded and next to the unprotected legs of the cutters.

The cutters are paid by the number of diamonds they cut per day ,work very long hours in order to get enough money to survive. Most of the cutters are not protected by India's Factory Act. Since this Act applies only to workplaces employing more than 9 workers, many owners save costs by registering every pair of ghantis as a 'workplace', no matter how many pairs there are in their workshop, thus ensuring that no 'workplace' has more than 9 workers. This deprived the workers of the benefits of the State Provident Scheme. This means if they lose their job or fall ill, they are immediately in enormous financial difficulty. There was likewise no enforcement of the Child Labour Act. During periods of diamond sale booms, or 'brens' as the trade calls them, tens of thousands of children are enticed from the countryside by recruitors or even relatives, abandoning school and parents for relatively good income. But, whenever De Beers ordained a cutback in 'Indian goods' or a recession came, they were quickly sacked. The use of child labour has been well known within the industry for many years. It was reported by David Koskoff in his 'The Diamond World' in 1981. Kantilal Chhotalal mentioned it in his authorative study of the Indian industry - yet nothing has been done about it.

Instead the number of children employed in recent years has been rapidly expanding. In the late 1980s about 11 per cent of the diamond cutting workforce were below age. By 1994 the number had grown alarmingly to about 16 per cent, about 64,000 children. In Surat 18 percent of the diamond workforce were underage had in 1994, well above the national average. These children are especially vulnerable to exploitation since they live away from their families

All the diamond cutting workshops had secure glass fronted or barred offices from where the cutters were issued the uncut diamonds and where records were kept of the size of the diamond before and after cutting. Often the poorer stones only yielded a gem of a tenth of the weight of the rough stone. The poor quality of the stones sent for cutting in India is such that on average 72 to 85 per cent is ground away. The dust from the diamonds had turned grey the walls and floors of some cutting shops. It presumably did the same to the workers' lungs. Cutters in America, Europe or Israel were less likely to be affected by dust as they were given by the CSO a better class of diamond.

Cutting diamonds is not safe. Diamond cutting is listed in the top 10 'hazardous industries' by the Indian government and the employment of children under 15 is banned for this reason. The diamond grinding wheels or 'scaifes', are rubbed with kerosene oil impregnated with the diamond dust needed to grind diamonds. The diamonds being cut are mounted on a small metal tool known as a tang. As diamonds are ground, fine dust sprays out.