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Chapter 1: Who was Princess Sophia Duleep Singh and what was her significance?
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Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Anand.
And me, William Drimple.
So today we're going to start a mini-series about the extraordinary daughters of the last ruler of the Sikh Empire, the Maharaja of the Punjab. Now, these four episodes are going to take us through the stories of different sisters. You have Sophia, Catherine, Bamba, Irene and Pauline. Now, these stories are so diverse.
They include the suffragettes, the women who fought to get women the vote, mixed race life in Edwardian London, lesbian love in Nazi Germany and resistance against the British Empire. And let me tell you, Empire Club members get this whole series in one go with no ads. So just follow the link in the description to join our club.
Now, these princesses grew up in the heart of the British Empire, which had destroyed their world and their family. And in this, I'm going to hand the reins over to Anita, because this is really not just her story. It's a story which she discovered, which she made famous. A woman who had been totally forgotten by history was resurrected.
And you wrote a wonderful book about it, which I much loved and enjoyed and reviewed.
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Chapter 2: What role did Sophia's family history play in her life?
You did, and you were very, very kind of it. And, you know, it's probably, whatever I do in this life, the thing I'm going to be most proud of. I wrote the biography of Princess Sophia de Lipsing and published it in 2015. And, you know, you've got to just imagine at that time, no one had ever heard of the Indian suffragette.
It was just a strange, weird... Some people said, have you made up a novel? Because it seems so far-fetched. But now, 2026... This is a woman who had a postage stamp dedicated to her. She's had a blue plaque in her honour.
Which you opened and managed to drop the entire thing on your head, I remember.
Curtain came on my head.
Yes, it did.
I yanked it with gusto. Also, currently an exhibition in Kensington Palace Gardens is dedicated to her and her sisters. So we're going to begin this series with Sophia, the Indian princess who fought for British women to have the vote.
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Chapter 3: How did Sophia's experiences in England shape her identity?
And I should say, we sort of lightly covered this at the beginning of our Empire adventure.
When we were just little baby podlings.
You liked the podlings. I liked that very much. So look, we're going to go into much more detail. But also, rather than just telling you about the family... I urge you to go back and listen to our Koh-i-Noor episodes where we go into a real deep dive into her father and grandfather. But we might as well sum it up.
So, I mean, just why don't you take the reins here, Willie, and sum up what her backstory, her lineage is.
So Sophia Dulip Singh was born 150 years ago, and she was a product of the great Sikh Empire, which was a considerable empire. Not many people, I think, learned about this at school.
But the Sikhs at one point controlled not only the current Indian Punjab and its Pakistani equivalent over the border, but a huge chunk of Kashmir and Himalayas right up to the borders of China and the Wakhan Corridor. And it's an enormous chunk of territory and was very powerful. It was the one Indian kingdom which, at the time of Ranjit Singh, had resisted the British.
It had ex-Napoleonic generals running its army.
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Chapter 4: What led to Sophia's political awakening and involvement in the suffragette movement?
And it was both economically and militarily a considerable force. And the British did not tangle with it.
You're right. And right at the helm of that was Sophia's grandfather, Maharaja Ranjit Singh.
Sheri Punjab.
Sheri Punjab, the Lion of Punjab, was what he was known as. There are two very different memories of Ranjit Singh's reign. In Pakistan, he is really not remembered very kindly. In India, a hero who repelled Afghan warlords who came over the mountains and would regularly raid Punjab. But Pakistan, not so enamoured.
It is one of those stories which divides depending on which side of the border you are. Pakistanis remember the very brutal generals, many of them these ex-Napoleonic guys who were regularly hanging people all over the gates of Peshawar and so on. But in India, he's regarded as one of the most tolerant, most enlightened rulers. And of course, for Sikhs, he's their great hero.
Every Sikh looks to Ranjit Singh as the greatest warrior who led their people and did this extraordinary work.
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Chapter 5: What events unfolded during the Delhi Darbar that affected Sophia?
job of freeing them from the bondage of both Marathas and Afghans and Mughals and giving them their own enormous state.
Yeah, absolutely right. And look, just in case you don't know, he cuts quite the figure. He had one empty sightless eye socket. And there is this story that's attached to his mythology that when a courtier once asked him, you know, what happened to your eye, sire? He said, God wanted me to look upon all religions with one eye, which is why he took the light from the other from me.
And Willie, something very famous that people will be familiar with on his bicep. Tell us.
So something that's still knocking around in contemporary politics, and anyone that saw our recent series about Mamdani's intervention about the Koh-i-Noor, this links back to Ranjit Singh, because Ranjit Singh prized the diamond out of the Afghans, particularly Shah Shuja al-Mulk, who was his prisoner, allegedly, according to Afghan sources, torturing his son in front of him until he handed it over.
And this is, you know, the symbol, this was the jewel in the crown in the hands of the Sikhs. So this is a great moment for Sikh history.
Absolutely right. So look, the story goes that after the death of Ranjit Singh, and again, go to our Koh-i-Noor episodes if you want to hear this in more detail. We go into it in granular detail in that. But there is great upheaval in the kingdom and the family is at war because who is going to succeed Ranjit Singh?
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Chapter 6: How did Sophia respond to the treatment of women during the suffragette protests?
Until the last man standing is not a man at all. It's a little boy called Duleep Singh.
With chubby cheeks in the picture.
Indeed. And he is going to be the father of our heroine today, Sophia. His story, we go into an enormous amount of detail in our Koh-i-Noor episodes again. And Willie, I mean, you've said it's a heartbreak story, isn't it, really?
It's a deeply upsetting story, both politically, because it is the tale of the end of Sikh rule and the conquest by this corporation, by the East India Company. But also on a personal level, this is a guy who loses his kingdom, grows up to be this beautiful adolescent that sort of Queen Victoria falls in love with, who's famously painted by Winterhalter.
It's one of the greatest, if not the greatest portrait to come from the Raj.
So, yeah, really tragic, you know, completely disenfranchised. He ends up in England and becomes a favourite of Queen Victoria, one of her many pets, some have observed, because she liked a foreign prince and princess. But she loves him. And so he's in great favour. But he can't marry anybody when he comes of age because he's too brown.
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Chapter 7: What were the consequences of the Black Friday protests for Sophia and her peers?
Instead, he goes searching for a bride. And the place that he searches for a bride is a mission in Cairo because he wants someone virginal, pure. He's disillusioned with the kind of sophistication of the British court.
We should have to say that at this point, he is far from virginal. Oh, no.
It's been long. living at large in the clubs of England. But he finds this young beauty and she's 16 years old. Her name is Bamba Muller. And it's really important because she gets written out of the story. And that's what we're trying to put back these really important characters into this story.
She is the daughter of a German merchant and what was described at the time as an Abyssinian slave, somebody that was a mistress rather than a wife, somebody who serviced her mullah rather than was his partner in life. And they then delete the product of this union, this very beautiful, Arabic-speaking, completely clean-living flower of a child is married to a much older man in 1864.
And she is the mother of Sophia. So Sophia and her siblings, there are six of them.
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Chapter 8: How did Sophia's legacy continue after her death?
There were seven, but one died very soon after birth. But six of them in the nursery. And this poor woman, Bamba Mula, who is completely alienated from society. She's alone. She doesn't have anything in common with the Duchess of Athol or all the people who are flocking around Duleep Singh and his marvellous house called Elverdon on the Norfolk-Suffolk borders.
Which used to belong to my mother's family, the Keppels, before he bought it.
Absolutely got to get a Dalrymple in there.
Not a Dalrymple, a Keppel.
It is a Keppel in there. But he sort of recreates this grand Mughal Indian Sikh empire throwback with a mishmash of styles that he gleans from archives in the London Museum. And John Nash designs it for him. And so, you know, there is all of this going on. And it looks like this young girl is going to grow up in the lap of luxury fashion.
We should talk about the children, though, because there were a few of them.
So there are these wonderful photographs of these kids. There's Victor, the eldest, who will go to Sandhurst to inherit the title. Frederick, known to the family as Freddy, who will go to Cambridge and become an antiquarian, improbably. And then there's Albert Edward, who she calls Eddie. And then there's three extraordinary women, Bamba, Catherine and Sophia.
Yeah, and honestly, the women are much more interesting than the men in this story.
As so often the case, Anita. I'm glad you can see that point.
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