March is Women’s History Month in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. As the month winds up, Kensington Palace, the childhood home of Queen Victoria, is paying homage to another royal, albeit one whose story is mostly unknown in the Indian subcontinent, where her forbears were from: Sophia Duleep Singh.
Sophia was the daughter of Duleep Singh, the last Maharaja of the Sikh Kingdom of the Punjab and the son of Maharaja Ranjit Singh through his wife, Jind Kaur.
As if that pedigree was not enough, Sophia later carved out her own niche as a suffragette icon, campaigning for voting rights for women at a time when one-half of humanity was denied the right to vote.
Kensington Palace has come up with an exhibition titled The Last Princesses of Punjab, which pays homage to Sophia and five other women whose ‘lives were shaped by Empire’.
It features, for instance, an original copy of The Suffragette, featuring the iconic image of Sophia selling copies of the newspaper by the gate of Hampton Court Palace. “The image caused a scandal in 1913, considered evidence of her support of a ‘dangerous’ cause,” notes an article on the palace’s website.
Sophia’s spoiled 1911 census record reading ‘No Vote, No Census’ is also on display, alongside a photograph of Princesses Sophia and her sister Catherine attending a suffrage dinner in 1930.
Duleep Singh was a boy of five when in 1843, he was placed on the throne of the Punjab. Ranjit Singh had died in 1839. After him, with no stable line of succession, the Empire began to collapse, before finally becoming part of British India in 1849.
Duleep, Ranjit Singh’s youngest son, was deposed by the East India Company and exiled to Britain at 15 years of age, where Queen Victoria, the ruling British Sovereign, became godmother to his children. Singh converted to Christianity and married Bamba Muller in 1864. He later became embittered with the British and reembraced Sikhism.
Muller, Queen Victoria and Jind Kaur are also part of the six women besides Sophia to be profiled in the exhibition.
Jind Kaur, was a defiant Maharani who acted as regent of the Sikh Empire on behalf of her young son, Duleep Singh. “Following her armies’ defeat in the Anglo-Sikh Wars, she was imprisoned. She was forcibly separated from her child for 13 years when he was sent to England,” notes the article.
Muller was the daughter of a German banker and an enslaved Ethiopian woman. She was born in Egypt. “Bamba grew up in poverty and was educated at a Christian mission in Cairo. There, she met her husband Maharaja Duleep Singh and moved to England. The exhibition features a letter written by Bamba in Arabic and English, showing how she was caught between two worlds. Its contents suggest her life in England was not always a happy one; she died a year after her husband left his family in 1886.”
The last two women to be profiled in the exhibition are Sophia’s sisters, Bamba and Catherine.
Catherine, according to the article, was an unassuming ‘guarantor’ to Jewish refugees escaping Nazi Germany and has become an icon for LGBTQ+ South Asian women. “She lived a quiet life in Germany with her former chaperone Lina Schäfer, with whom she shared a deeply personal and intimate relationship. Letters between Catherine and Sophia, some of which are included in the exhibition, offer a glimpse of Catherine’s feelings for her beloved companion.”
After Lina’s death, Catherine helped numerous Jewish refugees to seek sanctuary in Britain, offering accommodation and employment at her home in Buckinghamshire.
Bamba Sutherland, the oldest of Sophia’s sisters, considered herself heir to her grandfather Ranjit Singh’s empire, and returned to live in Lahore in the 1940s.
“In a letter dating from 1948, Princess Bamba makes her claims to the vast lands of her father, unfairly lost to the British. She valued the rich heritage of her family’s empire and invested in collecting and preserving traditional crafts; sarees worn by the Princess both in Norfolk and Lahore are on display.”
According to the article, Sophia, Catherine and Bamba Sutherland, along with Bamba Muller, Jind Kaur and Queen Victoria “each expressed womanhood, power, and royalty in different ways. They infused their identities and heritage into the causes they devoted themselves to, and became powerful changemakers in their own right.”
The exhibition — created to celebrate Sophia’s 150th birthday — “focuses on the women of a royal dynasty whose destinies were profoundly and violently transformed by it”.
“The voice of British South Asian people today is present throughout the exhibition, responding to themes of identity, expression, and resistance,” concludes the article.