12. Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary

Sophia Duleep Singh emerges in Anita Anand’s telling as a life lived at the junction of empire, gender politics and personal trauma. Born into the household of the deposed Maharaja Duleep Singh and raised within the orbit of Queen Victoria, Sophia enjoyed the privileges of court life in Britain—formal debuts (Buckingham Palace), grace-and‑favor lodgings at Hampton Court and magazine celebrity. Anita stresses the complexity of the Victoria–Duleep relationship: tender, documented in sketches and portraits, but later strained when Duleep sought to reclaim family property and status after being dispossessed in the nineteenth century.

The book maps Sophia’s transformation. A 1903 trip to India (the Delhi Durbar) and encounters with leading nationalists—Gokhale and Lala Lajpat Rai—exposed her to anti‑colonial sentiment and the visible suffering of Punjabis; these experiences helped convert a society figure into an activist. Back in Britain she aligned with the more militant wing of the women’s movement (the WSPU), fundraising, driving press‑carts and, most famously, participating in Black Friday (18 November 1910). Anita recounts a vivid moment when Sophia squeezed through the police kettle, confronted a constable who had obscured his badge (E700), and doggedly pursued a complaint that escalated to communications involving Winston Churchill. During World War I Sophia put politics aside to raise money for Indian troops and to nurse at Brighton, where wounded Sikh soldiers later identified her as a royal‑line figure and kept mementos she signed. Anita layers this public record with family tragedy—Duleep’s exile, his failed campaign to retake power, the family’s fractious British reception, and the sisters’ divergent paths (one sibling’s alcoholism, another’s same‑sex partnership)—and she flags archival gaps (lost letters) that shape what can be known. The host and guest agree the story’s tensions—privilege and dispossession, celebrity and exclusion, imperial intimacy and resistance—make Sophia an especially striking connector between the history of the Koh‑i‑Noor, Indian nationalism and early twentieth‑century British suffrage.