The extraordinary life of an exiled Punjabi princess, embraced by the British royal court and a goddaughter of Queen Victoria, but who would become a pioneering suffragette and challenge the very authority of the elite social circles in which she moved, is to be told in a new exhibition.
Princess Sophia Duleep Singh was the daughter of Duleep Singh, the last Sikh maharajah of the Punjab. As a child he was forced to surrender his lands to the East India Company in 1849, and sign away the famous Koh-i-noor diamond, now a potent symbol of colonial exploitation and set in the crown of the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.
He came to England, where he struck up a close friendship with Queen Victoria, and later married the daughter of a German banker and an enslaved Ethiopian woman, with their children growing up at Elveden Hall in Suffolk as aristocrats.
The powerful story of Sophia and the five women who shaped her life – her sisters Catherine and Bamba, her mother Bamba Muller, grandmother Jind Kaur and godmother Queen Victoria – is the subject of The Last Princesses of Punjab which opens at Kensington Palace on 26 March running until November.
Sophia was a devoted campaigner for women’s rights. A rarely exhibited, bound volume of The Suffragette, with an image of her selling copies at the gate of Hampton Court Palace, where Victoria had granted her a grace and favour apartment, is one highlight. Her handwritten letter to Winston Churchill reporting police brutality at the Black Friday suffragette march, where she marched alongside Emmeline Pankhurst in 1910, is another.
Through banners, including from the Women’s Tax Resistance League bearing the words “No Vote, No Tax” and other campaign marches, the exhibition explores how her and her sisters’ complex heritage shaped the causes they championed, telling a global story of empire, dispossession and resistance. She was taken to court three times for refusing to pay her taxes.
Her sister, Catherine, played a quiet but powerful role supporting Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution, as illustrated by a jewelled pendant, probably an heirloom from her grandmother Jind Kaur. Catherine acted as a guarantor for Jewish families in Germany, inviting them to live at her house in Buckinghamshire, and gave the pendant to an eight-year-old girl, Ursula Hornstein.
The display, which opens during Women’s History Month in the 150th anniversary of Sophia’s birth, includes personal letters, photographs and objects from the women’s lives, as well as contemporary responses from British south Asian women.
Items from her and her sisters childhood demonstrate their dual identity as British aristocrats and Punjabi princesses, including an ornately decorated rocking horse, and three-piece embroidered outfits worn by the children in personal photographs.
Polly Putnam, curator of collections for the Historic Royal Palaces, said: “This exhibition reveals a story of courage, identity and resistance told through the lives of extraordinary women. Presenting it within Kensington Palace – where Queen Victoria spent her childhood – gives us a rare opportunity to reflect on their intertwined histories, and to present objects that speak to both a global story and the personal stories of these women.”
Mishka Sinha, exhibition historian, added: “The women of her family lived through an extraordinary sweep of history, yet each found ways to exert influence and forge their own identity.”
