The Last Princesses of Punjab opens on Thursday at Kensington Palace
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.
