Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary
Shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize Winner of the Eastern Eye Alchemy Festival award for Literature In 1876 Sophia Duleep Singh was born into royalty. Her father, Maharajah Duleep Singh, was heir to the Kingdom of the Sikhs, a realm that stretched from the lush Kashmir Valley to the craggy foothills of the Khyber Pass and included the mighty cities of Lahore and Peshawar. It was a territory irresistible to the British, who plundered everything, including the fabled Koh-I-Noor diamond. Exiled to England, the dispossessed Maharajah transformed his estate at Elveden in Suffolk into a Moghul palace, its grounds stocked with leopards, monkeys and exotic birds. Sophia, god-daughter of Queen Victoria, was raised a genteel aristocratic Englishwoman: presented at court, afforded grace-and-favour lodgings at Hampton Court Palace and photographed wearing the latest fashions for the society pages. But when, in secret defiance of the British government, she travelled to India, she returned a revolutionary. Sophia transcended her heritage to devote herself to battling injustice and inequality,a far cry from the life to which she was born. Her causes were the struggle for Indian independence, the fate of the Lascars, the welfare of Indian soldiers in the First World War Â? and, above all, the fight for female suffrage. She was bold and fearless, attacking politicians, putting herself in the front line and swapping her silks for a nurse's uniform to tend wounded soldiers evacuated from the battlefields. Meticulously researched and passionately written, this enthralling story of the rise of women and the fall of empire introduces an extraordinary individual and her part in the defining moments of recent British and Indian history.
The Secretary of State blamed his colleagues for causing him to lie to Parliament:
'It seems clear from the papers that the Lieutenant-Governor of Burma refused
Lajpat's request to see his solicitor. This is in itself, a hateful thing to do, only
worthy of Russia, or, say Australia, in her Italian days. But worse still, I was
allowed to tell the House of Commons that access to a solicitor would of course
be allowed . . . More than that, I was permitted to say that he was allowed to
receive letters from ...
