Sophia, the Sikh princess from Britain who catalysed Indian women to get voting rights

Tata, in 1911, was on a holiday in Srinagar, Kashmir when she first got acquainted with Sophia. At first, it was a small green, white and yellow badge that Sophia was wearing that caught her attention. It had the words, ‘Votes for women’ inscribed on it. Herabai’s daughter Mithan Jamshed Lam, who was just 13 at that time, described the meeting in her memoir: “As we got friendly, she informed us that she was a member of the ‘Women’s League for Peace and Freedom in Britain….Thus her talks with Princess Sophie and the literature she sent immediately aroused my mother’s interest.” As the biographer of Sophia Duleep Singh, Anita Anand, notes, “ the princess managed to cast a spell on them both.” After meeting her, Herabai and Mithan found a new political voice. They devoted their lives to getting Indian women the right to vote.

The Indian princess in England

Born in 1876, Sophia was the fifth child of Maharaja Duleep Singh from his first wife Bamba Muller. Duleep Singh was the last among the Sikh Maharajas. He was crowned as monarch of the Sikh Empire at the tender age of five. By 1849, when he was eight-year-old, Duleep Singh was forced to abdicate his throne in favour of the East India Company and was exiled to Fatehgarh in the North West provinces, where he was placed under the care of a Scottish doctor and his wife.

Sophia Duleep Singh with her sisters Bamba and Catherine (Wikimedia Commons)

The exiled king, though, kindred special interest in Queen Victoria, who had a reputation for her adoration towards children from royal families across the Empire. She would regularly ask for reports of Duleep Singh’s progress and was fascinated to learn about his exotic good looks and his flawless English manners. Soon after Singh turned 15, he was allowed to go to England upon special permission from Victoria. Singh stayed on for most of life in England, where he got married and fathered 10 children out of whom five survived.

The Queen’s fondness for Singh ensured that he and his family lived in grandeur thanks to handsome allowances from the royal family. A lesser-known story goes that the Queen had once presented the Kohinoor to the Sikh monarch from whom the diamond had been forcefully taken away by the British back when he abdicated his throne. Singh is known to have dutifully returned the diamond to the Queen stating humbly, “It is to me Maam the greatest pleasure thus to have the opportunity, as a loyal subject, of myself tendering to my Sovereign the Kohinoor.”

Sophia was born in the sprawling country estate of Elveden Hall in Suffolk, which Singh had purchased at an exorbitant price in 1863 and then remodelled in Italian style. She is known to have been a plump, pretty, easygoing child, much in contrast to the fiercely independent and rebellious woman she would one day become.

In the years to come, the British government started taking note of Duleep Singh’s extravagant lifestyle and sent out frequent warnings to him about his spending. Singh would go on to respond with much anger, emphasising on the fact that since he was a deposed ruler, whose kingdom had been taken away from him without his consent, he should be given the allowance to live and spend as he likes. These early signs of rebellion in the Maharaja would eventually turn into a full-fledged war against the British royal family, eventually leading to his tragic fall from favour.

When it came to Sophia, however, the Queen felt a special obligation. Sophia was after all her god daughter, and the Queen believed she ought to be raised in an aristocratic way. After the demise of both her parents, she was placed under the legal guardianship of Arthur Oliphant, an employee of the India Office, who kept a careful watch upon her. Every report about her school work to religiosity found its way to the India Office and to Queen Victoria.

In her years of childhood, Sophia was stuck between two distinct identities. As historian Elizabeth Baker notes in her article (Suffragette Palace: Sophia Duleep Singh (1876-1948), Hampton Court Palace and votes for women (2021)), she was “never considered fully British because of the colour of her skin and her identification with India, but never fully Indian because of her English address, a German-Abyssinian mother and a childhood watched over by imperial bureaucrats.” During these early years itself, she learnt to negotiate her identity as a member of the British elite as well as an Indian living in Britain at a time when the country was at the peak of its empire.

In 1894, Queen Victoria hosted Sophia’s coming out party in the royal court, following which she was removed from under the care of the Oliphants. Thereafter, she received Faraday House, a grace and favour residence on the grounds of the historic Hampton Court Palace. Baker in her work explains that Faraday House transformed Sophia. She found new independence here. “She not only found all the freedoms associated with a ‘room of one’s own’ but she also became a frequent petitioner to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office about her rights as the goddaughter of Victoria and a royal tenant at Hampton Court Palace,” writes Baker.

It was also during this time that Sophia turned into a celebrity of sorts in England. Anand in her biography of Sophia notes that “publications such as Colonies and India, a weekly journal widely read throughout the British Empire, regularly commented on Princess Sophia’s comings and goings.” Her love for cycling and dog breeding made for great topics of interest among readers. Anand narrates how the once timid girl who used to squirm before the camera was now an unabashed show-off, striking absurd poses for newspaper photographers.

The British suffragist

The point of Sophia’s transformation from a fashionista celebrity in the UK to a leading member of the suffrage movement was during their first visit to India in 1903 for the coronation Durbar of King Edward VII in Delhi. Sophia and her sister Bamba Sutherland who were eager to participate in the durbar and see their homeland for the first time since they had been banned from stepping into India by the British government until now, was personally dissuaded by the Secretary of State for India to make this trip. The sisters went ahead in any case, and this was to be the moment of Sophia’s political awakening.

“Until that time she had been a socialite who had been accepted by the British establishment. In fact, they tried to embrace her and anglicise her as much as possible,” says Anand in an interview with Indianexpress.com. She cites an article in one of the most conservative of British publications named the Church Times, which called Sophia ‘a thoroughly English girl’ notwithstanding her great oriental heritage.

“But when she went to India she was just one brown face among many brown faces in the Raj. It was the first time that she experienced racism,” says Anand. The two sisters were not invited to any of the festivities of the Durbar leaving them feeling deeply insulted. “It was also the first time that she saw poverty and the impact that the British Raj had had over what she believed were her own people,” Anand added.

In those heady days of political discontent in the country, Sophia embarked upon a journey to learn more about her own lost Empire. She also, for the first time, came to acquaint herself with the work of nationalist leaders, particularly that of Lala Lajpat Rai and Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Their words and speeches demanding autonomy from the British had an impact on her and she returned to London a changed person.

In the initial days after her return, Sophia immersed herself in social philanthropy. This was the time when a radical form of women’s politics was emerging in Britain, that believed in getting women a stronger say in socio-political matters. A few names most closely associated with the movement included that of Emmeline Pankhurst, Millicent Fawcett, and Una Dugdale. In the years to come, Sophia found herself becoming a part of this circle.

In 1908, she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), a women-only militant political organisation campaigning for women’s suffrage in the UK. The following year, she joined the Women’s Tax Resistance League, based on the battle cry ‘No taxation without representation’. As part of the movement, Sophia too refused to declare her incomes and tore up letters from the tax office. Baker in her article points out that “the Women’s Tax Resistance League depended on publicity, and Sophia’s title and ‘exotic’ background secured significant media attention.”

As part of their protests the suffragettes would frequently make calculated attacks on politicians. Speeches were disrupted, placards thrown upon their faces and tyres of cars punctured. On November 18, 1910, Sophia was part of a group of around 300 women who marched to the Houses of Parliament in a bid to convince the government to pass a limited suffrage bill. The demonstration, remembered as ‘Black Friday’, took a violent turn as the police started assaulting the suffragettes and later arrested them.

The front page of The Daily Mirror, November 19, 1910, showing a suffragette on the ground. (Wikimedia Commons)

Due to her social status and the fact that she was well known to be associated with Queen Victoria, Sophia was saved from being sentenced by the police on several occasions, when her fellow suffragettes were imprisoned. Despite the protection given to her, she continued to protest both in militant and peaceful ways. On one instance she is known to have thrown herself on prime minister H H Asquith in order to slam a ‘give women the vote’ pamphlet on his window.

Her most significant political protest though was the one she staged within the royal grounds, from her residence at Hampton Court Palace. It was here that she began selling the ‘Suffragette’ newspaper, against a large board stating ‘Suffragette Revolution’. The act is known to have brought a lot of press attention to the Suffrage movement. A famous picture of Sophia posing for a newspaper wearing a large green coat studded with ‘Votes for women’ pins and carrying a large bag full of copies of the Suffragette flung across her chest is now considered iconic of the movement. It is captioned as “Princess Sophia Duleep Singh selling ‘The Suffragette’ outside the Hampton Court Palace, where she has a suite of apartments.”

Baker writes, “The picture and its caption informed the Britons who saw it that suffragettes could be anywhere and anyone. They could even have a royal title, an Indian name, and inhabit one of Britain’s most famous buildings.”

Sophia Duleep Singh and the Indian suffrage movement

Sophia’s identity as an Indian princess was of significance in the British suffrage movement. Historian Sumita Mukherjee in her book Indian Suffragettes notes that “having Indian women in a British suffrage demonstration was useful for imperial feminists to demonstrate the reach of their influence.” British suffragettes were keen on emphasising that their struggle was not just for women in Britain but also those in the larger British Empire.

One must remember that activism around women’s rights in India at this point was hardly about voting rights. As late as the early 20th century, when British women were fighting for their vote with increasing militancy, women’s groups in India remained rather untouched by those campaigns. Mukherjee in her book cites an interview of Sarojini Naidu while she was visiting Britain in which she said, “To us, you must understand, ‘the vote’ means nothing. Here, no doubt, it is a symbol standing for the idea of equality. There, it is an empty word suggesting a foreign ideal. What we are fighting for is not the vote, but a social and intellectual existence, equal to, while different from men.”

The struggle for women’s voting rights in India emerged sometime in the 1920s, only when Indians started finding a voice in their political matters and was directly a result of the influence that British suffragettes had on women from elite Indian households. Sophia’s role in this sense, being an Indian face in the forefront of the suffrage movement in Britain, was quite remarkable.

Sophia’s involvement in the British suffrage movement was indeed a result of her exposure to the anti-colonial movement demanding justice and autonomy from the British government in India. But in these early stages of her political awakening, Indian women’s rights were not what had caught her attention. It is only in her second visit to India in 1907 that she got acquainted with the need for women’s rights in India.

During her second trip to India, she met with social activist Sarala Devi who spoke to her about the plight of Indian women. “Sophia was struck by how very strong this woman was and how she took her destiny in her own hands and is taking a full part in the political struggle,” says Anand.

By 1917, the secretary of state for India, Edwin Montague, and his viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, began preparing for the Government of India Act to propose a dual form of government in which Indians would have a larger autonomy in governance. Several groups from India were invited to the House of Commons to give evidence before a Parliamentary Joint Select Committee. One of the first to book their passage to London for the purpose was the Women’s India Association that had been lobbying for equal rights for the last two years and was outraged knowing that the proposed reforms suggested by the Act was to entirely leave out women’s voting rights.

Three women were chosen to represent the interests of about 125 million Indian women. One among them was Herabai Tata, whose initiation to women’s suffrage was largely due to the friendship she struck with Sophia. Then there was Annie Besant, the British social activist who had devoted her life to the cause of Indian Home Rule, and Sarojini Naidu, political activist and poet.

Herabai Tata along with her daughter Mithan Tata, 1919 (Wikimedia Commons)

On the day they presented their case to Montague, they were joined by Sophia. The women argued their case passionately. As Anand notes in her book, they warned the British government “that if they made no provision for women’s votes, they would be introducing gender inequality to India deliberately and catastrophically.” Montague heard their case patiently, but refused to change the bill. Thereafter he left it to the provincial assemblies in India to decide on whether women were to be given the right to vote.

The women’s delegation was disappointed but hardly in any mood to give up. The strategic and persistent struggle carried out by them resulted in each of the provincial assemblies making way for women’s voting rights in India and finally for universal adult suffrage to be made part of the Indian Constitution after Independence.

Earlier this month, Sophia was honoured with a blue plaque outside one of her homes in Britain for the leading role she played in the British suffrage movement. In 2018, the Royal Mail in the UK released a postage stamp carrying the image of Sophia selling the Suffragette newspaper at her residence in Hampton Court Palace, in memory of her contribution to women’s rights in Britain.

In India, her role in influencing the movement for women’s voting rights remains largely forgotten. “In many ways Sophia should take credit for being the catalyst of the women’s voting rights movement in India,” says Anand. “It is shocking how invisible she is in India, especially considering the fact that despite her birth and growing up years being in Britain, she wanted her mortal remains to be taken back to India.”

On August 22, 1948, Sophia died peacefully in her sleep at the age of 71. Her sister Bamba, who was almost 80 by then and rather unwell, decided to fulfil Sophia’s final wishes. She took a long and painstaking sea and land journey to Lahore in Pakistan to scatter her sister’s ashes. It remains a mystery though as to where in Lahore she immersed the ashes of the Punjab princess.

Further reading:

Anita Anand, Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, Bloomsbury, 2015

Sumita Mukherjee, Indian Suffragettes: Female Identities and Transnational Networks, Oxford University Press, 2018

Elizabeth Baker, Suffragette Palace: Sophia Duleep Singh (1876-1948), Hampton Court Palace and votes for women, in The British Women’s Suffrage Campaigns: National and International Perspectives, Routledge, 2020