(Written by Jaspreet Virk Grewal) I have a long-standing obsession with the Last Maharaja of Punjab, Duleep Singh. You are only to ask my closest friends, and they would joke about how I can talk endlessly about his exile, the British annexation, and how his alienation from his homeland, mother tongue, and even his mother at the age of eleven mirrors contemporary diasporic feelings of loneliness. This obsession began ten years ago, when I first encountered his story in Anita Anand’s Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, a formidable historical account of a forgotten life. Duleep appears only in the first few chapters — being Sophia’s father, his role was more to shape her past. He, however, made quite an impression. Years later, when I came across his painting by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, this obsession solidified, and he became my raft to explore questions of identity, belonging, and the meaning of home. Anyone who has ever been part of the diaspora, or grown up in a fractured land, understands the hollowness that surfaces upon introspection of one’s self-identity. Gurnaik Johal, a young British writer, observes in his book Saraswati: “India, as he understood it, was a place for leaving.” And yet, diasporic art continues to rebuild and reclaim Punjab. I often wonder why those who leave home in search of a better future spend so much time dreaming of a homeland that exists only in folktales — a Punjab where fields are still green and golden, mothers are protective trees of shade, and fathers are not drowned in alcohol but part of a utopian dream. On social media, nostalgia thrives: women draped in phulkaris singing folk songs; the Big Fat Punjabi wedding, inflated and commodified, yet still acting as a canon of cultural longing. If India were only a transitory space, why do we carry a romantic notion of home in our hearts — a notion so well captured in music, poetry, and literature? Of inner languages and alienation Perhaps the answer lies in anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s claim that “there is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture.” In other words, we can reinvent ourselves in a new nation, but culture is woven into the fabric of our identities — inescapable. And if culture is inseparable from human nature, then language is its most intimate vessel. Eva Hoffman, in her essay The New Nomad from Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Language and Identity, writes about how the absence of an inner language can dull the world outside. Without the ability to think and feel in a language embedded deep within the psyche, the world becomes less vivid — which can also affect how one engages with their environment, and whether they feel safe or alienated. Duleep Singh embodied this loss. At eleven, he was torn from everything familiar: his environment that was his palace and his people, his protector; his mother and the languages that gave him a sense of self — Persian and Hindustani. Placed under the guardianship of a British officer, Sir John Login, and later taken to England, he would never return to Punjab. He died in exile, longing for his homeland. Adapting to an alien culture What strikes me most, reading the colonial correspondence compiled in Sir John Login and Duleep Singh by Lady Login, is how consistently Duleep is described as docile and obedient. What appeared as submission, I would argue, was in fact confusion and self-preservation. His formative years were spent navigating a sharp dissonance: familiar Oriental settings replaced by an alien British education. The result was a dual identity without a bridge — a disassociation that left him without an inner language to anchor his sense of self. The diaspora, in many ways, faces a gentler version of this fracture. Although, in a modern setting, with faster communication channels, one may not be as brutally ripped from home and language, this duality of existing in two spaces still creates moments of puzzlement and hollowness — what we commonly call ‘homesickness.’ In those moments, we reach instinctively for language: a ghazal that functions as a time capsule, a film in our mother tongue, or stories from home. This is where language cradles us, bringing us back to ourselves. This relationship to language — that provides an instant cocoon — perhaps cannot be imitated by mastery of any new one. Anyone who has experienced a rift between their home and themselves knows that if a physical house is made of bricks and mortar, the house of imagination and memory is built of language — softened by the words our mothers spoke, carrying us back to the safety of childhood dreams. (The author is a human resources professional. She divides her time between Sangrur and Jalandhar, and runs the Instagram account @thedustytypewriter, where she shares her interest in books and historical content.)
