Who Was Princess Sophia Duleep Singh?

In November 1910, a princess marched on Parliament in a bid to secure women’s right to vote in the United Kingdom.

Sophia Duleep Singh, the daughter of the Sikh Empire’s last maharaja, was “as close to an international celebrity as it was possible to be” in that era, wrote journalist Anita Anand in her 2015 biography of the Punjabi princess. But Sophia’s presence failed to discourage the police from violently suppressing the suffragettes’ protest on a day that would later become known as “Black Friday.” Although Sophia herself sustained no serious injuries, many of the other 300 women endured brutal treatment and even sexual assault. By the day’s end, authorities had arrested 116 suffragettes—including the princess.

Sophia’s journey from privileged royal to outspoken activist is the subject of a new exhibition at Queen Victoria’s childhood home, Kensington Palace in London. Titled “The Last Princesses of Punjab,” the show—timed to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Sophia’s birth in 1876—spotlights Sophia and five women whose lives intersected with hers.

“The women of [Sophia’s] family lived through an extraordinary sweep of history, yet each found ways to exert influence and forge their own identity,” says Mishka Sinha, the exhibition’s historian, in a statement. “We hope visitors will be moved and surprised by the histories they uncover.”

A Sikh maharaja in exile

Sophia’s life coincided with the British Empire nearing its zenith, at great cost to its colonies. Her paternal grandfather, Ranjit Singh, established the Sikh Empire in 1799, in the Punjab region, which spans modern-day India and Pakistan. After his death in 1839, the kingdom fell into disarray, creating a power vacuum filled by his wife Jind Kaur (also known as Jindan), who acted as regent on behalf of her young son, Duleep Singh.

When Duleep was just 10 years old, the East India Company capitalized on growing unrest in the Sikh Empire to annex Punjab as a British province; Jindan was exiled and imprisoned, while Duleep was placed under the care of a Scottish army surgeon. The deposed maharaja converted to Christianity in 1853 and moved to England the following year, impressing Victoria with what she described as his “pretty, graceful and dignified manner.”

Britain’s elite viewed Duleep as a fellow aristocrat. “He was that exotic prince, and [Victoria] treated him like a favorite son, and he would be invited to every royal gathering,” historian Peter Bance told BBC News in 2014. “He became the ideal party piece that every lord and lady wanted at their event.” Still, authorities monitored his activities and prevented him from visiting his mother in case she urged him to resist British occupation. It was only in 1861, when the British no longer viewed Jindan as a threat, that they permitted mother and son to reunite.

The exhibition features a portrait of Jindan painted in England after her reunion with Duleep. “In the preparatory sketch, you see a woman who looks like she’s lived a life—like a woman who has escaped and walked thousands of miles across mountains,” curator Polly Putnam tells the London Times.

Jindan died in 1863, prompting her son to return her body to India for cremation. On the way back to England, Duleep stopped in Egypt, where he met Bamba Müller, the daughter of a German banker and his enslaved Ethiopian mistress. The couple married in 1864, moving to an estate in Suffolk soon after. They had seven children, five of whom survived to adulthood, between 1865 and 1879. Sophia, the second-youngest of the siblings, received a name that reflected her rich family history: Sophia, after her maternal grandmother; Jindan, after her paternal grandmother; and Alexandrovna, after her godmother, Queen Victoria, who was born Alexandrina Victoria.

According to Historic Royal Palaces, the organization that oversees Kensington Palace, Sophia enjoyed a comfortable childhood at her family’s estate, which “was rebuilt by her father with an Italianate exterior and palatial Mughal interior, full of rich textiles and furnishings.” But Duleep soon grew frustrated with the British government, which refused to pay him the full amount promised under the treaties that had precipitated the fall of the Sikh Empire.

In debt and increasingly in favor of expelling the British from Punjab, the maharaja announced his intentions of returning to India and converting back to Sikhism. British authorities responded by detaining Duleep and his family en route in 1886. The deposed royal found himself “trapped in diplomatic limbo,” Anand wrote in her 2015 biography, Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary. “The British would not let him go forward, and he himself did not want to go back.”

Duleep sent his family back to England and retreated to Paris to plan his next move. He never saw Bamba again, as she died after falling into a coma the following year. Instead, the maharaja spent his time in France conspiring to take back his throne. He also started a new family with his second wife, the Englishwoman Ada Wetherill. (Historian Sundeep Braich notes that the Kensington exhibition’s title is technically inaccurate, as Duleep’s daughters by Wetherill—Pauline, born in 1887, and Irene, in 1889—were, “by simple chronology, the actual last-born princesses of Punjab,” despite never being recognized by Victoria as legitimate.)

The maharaja died in Paris in October 1893. In his obituary, a London newspaper reported that Duleep had “lived to see his mistake” in “describing himself as the implacable enemy of England,” begging Victoria for a pardon that she granted. Employing typically paternalistic language, the newspaper added, “England, most assuredly, is not to blame for the failure of his life. He might have lived and died a respectable and respected country squire, but he would have made a very indifferent ruler of the Punjab, even in the most favorable conditions.”

Sophia Duleep Singh’s life in Britain

Back in England, the queen ensured that Sophia and her siblings received a “proper” upbringing despite their father’s absence. Sophia attended a day school in Brighton, while her older sisters, Bamba and Catherine, enrolled in a women’s college at the University of Oxford. Victoria granted the princesses a grace-and-favor residence at Hampton Court Palace where they could live rent-free, courtesy of the crown; freed from the oversight of their English guardians, the trio made their society debut in 1895.

Sophia had always been quieter than her sisters, preferring to stay out of the limelight despite her natural gift for music and dance. But as she settled into life at Faraday House, filling the residence with dogs, parakeets and lorikeets, in addition to attending countless balls and banquets, she “developed an appetite for attention,” Anand wrote. “As the society columns began to notice her, it was not long before newspapers were dissecting her developing sense of style. As the century drew to a close, Sophia became an integral part of the circles that had once embraced and then shunned her father.”

Even as Sophia asserted her newfound independence, she found herself negotiating “between the easy existence granted to her as a member of Britain’s elite and her ambiguous position as an Indian woman living in Britain during the heyday of the British Empire,” historian Elizabeth Baker wrote in 2021.

Visits to India in 1903 and 1907 further shaped the princess’ evolving worldview, exposing her to nationalists like Lala Lajpat Rai, who criticized Britain’s lackluster response to famines while emphasizing Indians’ right to self-determination. After authorities charged Rai with sedition and sentenced him to hard labor, Sophia bemoaned the punishment in her diary, writing, “Oh, you wicked English, how I long for your downfall. How I loathe you all. … I am your deadly enemy from hereafter. Such injustice I cannot stand.”

Need to know: The other Duleep Singh sisters

• The stories of Sophia’s older sisters are no less remarkable than hers. Bamba made frequent trips to the British Raj, settling in Lahore, in what is now Pakistan, during World War II. In 1948, she wrote a letter staking her claim to the lands conquered by her grandfather.
• Catherine moved to Germany in the 1900s with her governess and lover but grew increasingly uneasy in her adopted country after the Nazis came to power. She offered to serve as guarantor for several Jewish families seeking to emigrate to Britain on the eve of the Holocaust.

Sophia the suffragette

Anand traces Sophia’s burgeoning activism to her second visit to India. “It was on that trip that she realized that when she was in London, she was treated like Princess Diana, but in India, she was treated no better than a coolie. She was shunned,” the author said at a 2015 event. “She did not feel comfortable in the clothes she wore, and when she returned to Britain, she did not trust high society anymore, and she felt she did not belong.”

Although Sophia had been radicalized by the plight of the Indian people, she found her ability to advocate for them limited by geographical distance. Instead, she turned her attention to a different cause: women’s suffrage. She joined the Women’s Social and Political Union, a militant suffrage organization led by activist Emmeline Pankhurst, and soon became one of the group’s most visible members, capitalizing on her fame to rally the public’s support.

On Black Friday in 1910, Sophia was one of the suffragettes hand-selected by Pankhurst to lead a demonstration at Parliament Square. Police separated Pankhurst, Sophia and the other women in the vanguard from the rest of the suffragettes, forcing them to watch helplessly as their peers were subjected to horrific violence. Winston Churchill, the new home secretary, had instructed the police to stop the protesters from reaching Parliament without arresting them; the officers interpreted this guidance as license to use whatever means necessary to accomplish their goal.

Of the atrocities Sophia witnessed that day, she was most affected by a woman who was repeatedly thrown to the ground by an officer, seemingly to the point of almost losing consciousness. The princess elbowed her way through the crowd and confronted the man, taking note of his badge number so she could file a complaint against him. Despite Churchill’s request to avoid arresting the suffragettes, the police detained 116 women, including Sophia, although they released the prisoners the following morning without pressing charges. Churchill later refused requests to open a formal inquiry into the officers’ conduct.

Sophia regularly sold copies of the Suffragette newspaper outside of her home at Hampton Court. In 1911, she participated in a census protest by scribbling “as women do not count, they refuse to be counted” on her official paperwork. This defiance earned her the government’s scrutiny: Authorities monitored her closely, just as they had her father. Surveillance records of Sophia’s activities went on view at the British Library in 2020, offering “a sense of just how unsettled people were … by her but also by suffrage as a whole,” curator Polly Russell told the Guardian in 2019. “It was seen as a real problem for the state.”

After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Sophia and some (but not all) of her fellow suffragettes shifted their focus to supporting Britain’s war effort. The princess volunteered as a nurse and visited hospitals for Indian soldiers fighting on Britain’s behalf. When a contingent of Indian veterans stopped at Hampton Court while participating in peace celebrations in 1919, Sophia photographed them and preserved their portraits in an album.

Even after Britain granted women the right to vote, first with restrictions in 1918 and then on the same terms as men in 1928, Sophia remained dedicated to the suffrage cause. She joined a group established to preserve the movement’s history and provided the flowers for a dedication ceremony marking the unveiling of a statue of Pankhurst in 1930.

Sophia died in 1948—the year after India and Pakistan gained their independence—at 72. Today, the princess has been largely forgotten—a trend that the Kensington Palace exhibition hopes to change. “As far as her place in history is concerned, Sophia was perhaps her own worst enemy,” Anand wrote in her biography. “She never sought glory and disliked speaking in public. Before her death, when asked to contribute to her entry in the women’s Who’s Who, Sophia Duleep Singh’s was one of the briefest in the book. Under ‘interests,’ she wrote just one line: ‘the advancement of women.’”

“The Last Princesses of Punjab” is on view at Kensington Palace in London through November 8, 2026.