JOURNALIST Anita Anand’s account of the hitherto unknown life of Princess Sophia, (1876-1948), the fifth child of deposed Maharajah Duleep Singh, is a commendable debut. Although she has primarily been concerned with the radio and television sectors, in this work, Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, Anand displays a remarkably accomplished grasp over historical research and methodology. Supported by a useful bibliography and detailed endnotes, the biographer brings to life the story of a woman whose birth and adventures made her a subtle, yet vital, player in aspects of English and sub-continental history.

The book is divided into three sections, the first of which delineates the history of Sophia’s ancestors, most notably her grandfather Maharajah Ranjit Singh, the uncompromising, one-eyed ruler of the Sikhs. Ranjit’s liaison with a beautiful and determined woman named Jindan resulted in the birth of Sophia’s father, Duleep.

Anand does a fine job of conveying how treacherous the political landscape of that time was; though Jindan attempted to rule after Ranjit’s death, she eventually lost both her son and the Koh-i-Noor diamond to the English court, where Empress Victoria took charge of the young prince. Coerced into relinquishing his Sikh religion, and becoming Christian and Anglicised, Duleep found himself consistently having to negotiate the burdens of his failed birthright with creating a semi-dignified future for himself. His marriage to a part-German, part-Abyssinian beauty named Bamba resulted in three boys and three girls, but aside from being fertile there was little that was positive about the union. Duleep took solace in the arms of a mistress by whom he eventually had a couple more daughters, and there is something genuinely tragic about how his life continued to spiral downwards as he unsuccessfully attempted to engage the Russians in assisting him against the British.

Victoria is presented as displaying a proprietorial and kind, if condescending, interest in all of Duleep’s children. Financial settlements were eventually made on all of them, and they grew up on the comfortable estate of Elveden, where they lacked no creature comforts, although the Maharani Bamba’s decline into deep depression was a source of concern for all of them in varying degrees. Their English guardians, the Oliphants, were kind people, but Sophia was psychologically scarred by having to witness the death of her beloved younger brother, Eddie, who succumbed to pneumonia in his early teens. Her strong-willed older sister Bamba, and the gentler Catherine, were placed at Somerville College, Oxford, but Sophia was not put through much formal education. All three girls were presented at court, and the book (which is rich in interesting photographs) includes a striking image of them dressed in white ballgowns and pearls, their hair elaborately coiffed, their expressions carefully neutral. Sophia was eventually given a grace-and-favour residence in Hampton Court Palace, but her upper-crust existence was consistently compromised by what the British perceived to be the stains of her ethnicity; to Anand’s credit, it is the very objectivity of her tone when describing this ongoing battle with xenophobia that enables the reader to see Sophia in an almost consistently sympathetic light.

The princesses’ tensions with the India Office in Britain are well-documented — for the celebrations on the coronation of Edward VII, they made their way anonymously by ship to India where their general reception was a frosty one. There are subtle, intermittent hints throughout the book that Catherine may have been in a homosexual relationship with her beloved German governess, Lina Schaeffer, and indeed she eventually chose to live a relatively quiet life with Lina in Germany. Bamba spent much of her later life in India, where she was able to be as authoritative and domineering as she was naturally inclined to be; however, there is no doubt that Sophia was the gentlest and most accommodating of the three. Their brothers Victor and Frederick remained in Britain; the peaceful lifestyle of the latter succeeded in attaining for him the respect of the English that his ill-fated father had been so assiduously denied. Sophia shuttled between India and Britain, espousing the cause first of the lascars (dirt-poor, Indian seamen working for the British navy), and then of the suffragettes.

The second and longest section of the book dwells on Sophia’s involvement with the latter initiative; she became an ardent follower of Emmeline Pankhurst, and Anand provides exceptionally vivid accounts of the opposition from the government (and police brutality) against which such enterprising women had to battle in order to eventually be given the right to vote. Even the crafty Winston Churchill found it difficult to control the onset of this movement, which metaphorically speaking turned even relatively gentle women into political Amazons. Particularly horrific are the descriptions of how individuals such as the redoubtable Constance, Lady Lytton would go on prolonged hunger strikes, and be roughly force-fed by the authorities who worked desperately to keep them alive. Anand copes well enough with underscoring salient features of Indian emancipation from the Raj, but while Sophia was impressed by the endeavours of Gandhi and Gokale, not to mention those of her mentor, the feisty Punjabi Lala Lajpat Rai, she was able to achieve more in Britain than she was in India. Nevertheless, Anand displays admirable academic responsibility in providing gripping accounts of unspeakably horrific instances such as the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre, ordered by Brigadier General Dyer.

In her later years Sophia developed a close friendship with her housekeeper, Bosie, a woman whose child, Drovna, inspired a deep maternal instinct in Sophia. It is thanks to the author’s interviews with individuals such as Drovna that we have a clearer account of Sophia’s life; very little information on her was published prior to this book, though her personal diary is kept at the British Museum.

Psychologically a rather adaptable individual for whom the loss of true royal status was upsetting but not tragic, she suffered less than most of her siblings. Her half-sister Irene became seriously depressed, and on her committing suicide, Irene’s estate was bitterly contested by her full sibling Pauline and her half-sister Bamba. Pauline won, but Bamba put her through legal hell in a way the humbler Sophia never would have done. It is hard to say what Sophia would have been like had she been raised as a legitimate Sikh princess, as opposed to displaced royalty, but given what she did independently accomplish in socio-political terms perhaps the loss of her Indian royal status may have been the greatest gift that destiny bestowed on her.

Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary

(HISTORY)

By Anita Anand

Bloomsbury, India

ISBN 978-1408835456

416pp.