1️⃣ The first diamond ever touched by human hands came from Indian soil. Golconda mines, 4th century BCE. We didn't dig for profit. We picked them from riverbeds like pebbles. 💎
Then someone realized they could own what the earth gave freely.
2️⃣ 1600s: Golconda diamonds weighed 23 million carats annually. The world's entire supply. Tavernier documented it. Shah Jahan embedded them in the Peacock Throne.
We controlled brilliance itself.
3️⃣ 1739: Nadir Shah walks into Delhi. Walks out with the Kohinoor and the Peacock Throne. Combined worth? Impossible to calculate. The throne alone held 26,733 gems.
You already know that for over 2,000 years, Indian smiths forged steel so sharp it cut European swords in half. So resilient it became legend across continents.
By 1900, those same smiths were classified as backward. Primitive. Incapable of innovation.
What happened between? 🧠⚔️ You don't know!!
A 5-step manual for erasure. READ On 👇
#decolonisation #UncropTheTruth
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Step 1: Extract the technique
Indian wootz steel arrived in British laboratories in 1795. Samples were analysed, chemical compositions documented, papers published in the Royal Society. The steel was credited to "Eastern origin." The smiths who forged it? Unnamed. Untraced. Irrelevant.
The technique was extracted. The technician was erased.
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Step 2: Disrupt the ecosystem
Wootz steel required specific forests for charcoal, particular ores, seasonal smelting cycles. Colonial forest laws between 1855–1878 criminalized wood collection, turned smelting zones into "reserved land," cut access to raw materials.
The furnaces went cold. Not because knowledge disappeared, but because resources were locked behind permits the smiths couldn't obtain.
1/ When artefacts disappear from protected monuments, the response is usually administrative.
Files are opened, reports are written, and records are updated.
By the time this happens, the loss has already occurred much earlier.
2/ Many antiquities under protection are still incompletely catalogued, irregularly verified, or stored without consistent physical security.
In such cases, legal custody exists on paper, but effective control on the ground is weak or absent.
3/ Once local community presence was removed from many sites, informal and continuous surveillance disappeared with it.
As a result, losses are often discovered only years later, during audits or inspections, when recovery is no longer realistic.
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