Sophia Duleep Singh: The Indian Princess Who Earned British Women Voting Rights

Aristocratic pleasures fell short when Sophia's attention was caught by social crises unfolding around the world.

The brightest star in Duleep Singh’s rather uninspiring life was the youngest of his six children from his first marriage – Princess Sophia Duleep Singh.

(Photo: Vibhushita Singh/The Quint)

In his dispatches around what he called “India’s first Independence movement,” the uprising of 1857, Karl Marx wrote that the British could be as revolutionary abroad as they were conservative at home and were extremely glad to topple foreign monarchs as long as it suited their vested commercial and colonial interests.

The 1857 uprising in India ultimately resulted in the termination of Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar’s largely ceremonial rule. But just a few years before the uprising, in 1848, the British undertook the annexation of Punjab, the northern kingdom that had expanded into what is now Kashmir and Afghanistan.   

At the time, 11-year-old Duleep Singh, heir to Ranjit Singh, the former Maharaja of the Sikh Empire, was forced to sign Punjab away to the British. But he didn’t leave the table empty handed. In return, he was dispatched to England after four years of an English education and conversion to Christianity.

In the UK, he was patronised by Queen Victoria and furnished with a handsome pension from the government, provided he "remain obedient to the British Government," which mostly set him up for a comfortable life of an English aristocrat in Suffolk’s Elveden.  

But unfortunately for Duleep Singh, as hard as he tried to acclimatise and adapt to the life, he was not an aristocrat, and he was definitely not British. Eventually, his extravagant lifestyle and thrifty accounting led to a financial whirlwind in his life.  

Humiliation followed. His life was embellished with turbulence, spent in a drunken daze with several broken marriages, a series of affairs, a controversial reconversion to Sikhism, and an embittered relationship with the Brits.  

His dreams of reclaiming the throne in Punjab, with assistance from the Russians or the French, eventually ended when he died a pitiful, isolated death in a cheap Parisian hotel in the 1890s.  

However, the brightest star in Duleep Singh’s rather uninspiring life was the youngest of his six children from his first marriage – Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, whose life is best captured by Anita Anand in her book, 'Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary.'

A Star Is Born

Belgravia-born Princess Sophia took the route of aristocrats embellished with private tutors, extravagant balls, and dog-breeding.

With the blessings of her godmother, Queen Victoria, she wore Parisian dresses, bred championship dogs, pursued photography, and became the belle of the debutante ball. 

The third daughter of Maharaja Duleep Singh and his first wife, who was of Abyssinian (Ethiopian) descent, Sophia, born in the summer of 1876, spent her formative years in the English countryside, frolicking with her brothers and sisters within enclosures filled with rare parrots, ostriches, and monkeys. It might have lasted longer, but the Maharaja’s call to use the estate to pay off his creditors put a damper on Sophia’s largely comfortable life.  

Sophia and her siblings were sucked into the Maharaja’s tussle with the English monarchy, which eventually led the family to defy British orders, pack their bags, and travel to India, only to be arrested in Aden, Yemen. They were refused passage through the Suez Canal and essentially forced to return to London. But the Princess’ arrest at the supple age of 10 would not be her last.  

Overnight, her life changed course. She was dumped back in England, without the support of Duleep Singh, who ran off with a chambermaid and left his family destitute.

Sophia suffered, losing her mother, who drowned in sorrow and alcohol, and then her youngest and beloved brother, who succumbed to an illness. But the love, and more importantly, financial and residential provisions she received from her ever-so-sympathetic godmother, the Queen, allowed the grief-stricken Princess to enter high society.  

Her path was quite different from that of her sisters. One of her sisters, Bamba, settled down in India, hoping to promote the revolution from Lahore, while another, Catherine, moved to Germany with her former tutor, or etiquette coach for rich children, who had become her lover.  

But Sophia was different. Like her mother, she was quiet and unassuming, a quality that appealed to Queen Victoria. She seemed to satisfy the zest for life inside her.

After a short spell of acting the debutante ball, almost an aristocratic necessity in British society, she was embraced as a socialite, perhaps more due to Damocles sword, in the form of support from the British Royal Family. 

The Princess settled at the grace-and-favour apartments at Hampton Court, usually awarded to the families of men who martyred themselves for the Crown.

Spending her days shopping, gracing the fashion magazine’s pages, and breeding award-winning Pomeranians, Anand's book says.

The gossip pages were more than happy to write about the newest Indian princess on the scene, who championed her more ‘unfeminine’ hobbies like smoking, riding her fairly modern bicycle, and armed in chic dresses from bespoke tailors in Paris.  

But the joy Princess Sophia received from aristocratic pleasures fell short when her attention was caught by the damaging manifestations of various social and political crises unfolding around the world.  

Given her rather quaint nature, the British government lessened their vigilance on the princess, a misjudgement by the Crown.  

She took a clandestine trip to India with Bamba, where she attended the 1903 Delhi Durbar, an imperial-style mass assembly organised by the British at Delhi’s Coronation Park to celebrate Edward VII’s coronation.

She also travelled to India in 1907, a less secret trip.

In her grandfather’s capital of Shalimar Bagh, Lahore, she hosted a purdah party. Shadowed by swarms of British agents, she witnessed the brilliance of Indian freedom fighters like Lala Lajpat Rai and Gopal Krishna Gokhale, expressing sympathy for the movement.

The Princess was head-over-heels for Lala Lajpat Rai’s work and praised his struggles – he had been imprisoned on sedition charges at the hands of the British – which first set Sophia off against the Raj.  

But more than that, the forbidden trip to India took off the rosy glasses Sophia had donned at Hampton Court. She was shocked to witness the manifestations of famine and the suffering of people who once formed her family’s praja (the King’s subjects).

Moreover, the first-hand experience of the gross suffering of India at the hands of the Crown horrified the Princess.

The high-society parties and fawning press now seemed more hollow than usual, especially when weighed against the atrocities against her people by the Crown. She returned transformed, looking for a more weighted reason to wake up every morning.  

Princess Sophia returned to England looking for a fight.  

Princess Sophia 2.0

The pain followed her to England, where she watched women fight for their rights. The suffragette movement in the UK had just started, with women raising their voice for voting rights. The trip to India set off a flame within Sophia, one that would send her on a lifelong journey of fighting for women’s rights.

Sophia’s position in society led her to the inner circle of Emmeline Pankhurt, founder of the Women's Social and Political Union – an all-women suffrage advocacy organisation.

In 1909, at the home of renowned suffragette activist Uma Dugdale, who made headlines for her refusal to say "and obey" in her marriage vows, the Princess joined the WSPU.

Her involvement with the WSPU and the suffragette movement began softly, mostly with activities such as fundraising, bake sales, donating her own money to the cause, and driving press carts around London. But as calendar pages flipped, she took up a more direct role.

Soon enough, she was marching to Parliament, dodging census takers, and refusing to pay her taxes, taking up a familiar rallying call – “No taxation without representation” – and moreover, one that perfectly described the British’s dislike for the suffragettes – “The most vilified women in England.”

An annoyed King George V, who was already exasperated at the resistance and Independence Movement in India, frustratingly asked about the Princess, "Have we no hold on her?"

Black Friday

Dressed in her bespoke fur, a single brown face in a sea of white, the Princess consistently crossed paths with the police at protests, but the skirmishes peaked come November 1910, when the Princess joined a suffragette rally which later became to be known as ‘Black Friday.’

At the protest, Sophia and Emmeline led the way as suffragettes marched towards the House of Commons with hopes of convincing then-Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s government to pass a limited suffrage bill.

But Sophia’s life changed course, like the movement’s, as the protest took a turn for the worse when the police turned violent and started arresting the suffragettes.

Being the person she was, Black Friday simply pushed her deeper into the movement, sealing her commitment to the cause. Sophia was often found selling The Suffragette newspaper at Hampton Court Palace, a home she was granted as a favour by Queen Victoria.

Her activities angered King George V to such an extent that he was on the brink of throwing her out of Hampton Court but relented to avoid a scandal. 

The act of an imperial subject, a Princess from a royal Indian line, selling The Suffragette newspaper outside a building that took pride in its imperial history was a challenge to the Crown, a loud scream against the establishment.  

She went as far as joining a protest which aimed at directly subverting the census because “if women don’t count, neither should they be counted.” But her magnum opus came when she threw herself at Asquith’s car, screaming slogans and clenching a banner that read “Give Women the Vote,” which she slammed on the prime minister’s window.

Her audacious leap on the PM’s car, being a member of high society, coupled with her continued participation in protests and fundraising, attracted immense attention to the suffragette movement – both a boon and a bane. 

A photo of Sophia selling newspapers made its way into Buckingham Palace, right at the feet of King George V, who despised the suffragette. The fact that the princess brought ideas as ‘impure’ as suffrage for women to royal grounds angered the King.

But regardless, his hands were tied. The King knew that he would be a fool to evict his grandmother’s favourite goddaughter, who was using her position in society to subvert nationalist ideas, bringing more attention to the suffrage movement.  

While the movement began reaching the highest and lowest echelons of England, suffrage sisters were imprisoned, and some went on hunger strikes – who either stopped by their own volition before the strike physically killed them or were forced to stop, courtesy brutal force-feedings at the hands of their own government.

Within the Princess, a realisation: The Crown’s antics seemed as ruthless at home as it was in the subcontinent’s colonies.  

A Win 

When the First World War put a damper on the suffrage battle, Sophia took to the bedside of wounded Indian soldiers and sailors from India, known as lascars.

Even though she barely spoke any ‘Hindustani’ and most of the white nurses were better equipped to communicate with injured soldiers in the trenches, the overwhelmed soldiers were honoured to be tended to by the granddaughter of the Lion of the Punjab and Sikh Empire founder Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

The protesting Princess also joined a 10,000-strong women's protest against the prohibition of a female volunteer force.  

In the long fight for women’s rights, the first fruits of the Princess’ labour came when the Representation of the People Act of 1918 was passed, giving women over 30 the right to vote.

This was the suffragette movement’s first victory, and this revolutionary moment laid the groundwork for the Representation of People Act of 1928, which allowed all women to vote at 21.  

The Crown worked particularly hard to keep the Princess’s name out of history books. While she was constantly getting arrested, she was never behind bars for long. Then again, who would want to lock up or force-feed Queen Victoria’s goddaughter?

Recently, she was honoured with a commemorative Blue Plaque in London, run by the English Heritage charity, which honours buildings of historic significance associated with historical figures. The 2023 cohort includes the Princess' very own Hampton Court Palace.

After the enactment of the Representation Act, Sophia joined the Suffragette Fellowship, remaining a member till she passed in her sleep at her sister's home in Buckinghamshire.

It seems ironic how a rich, high-class princess turned into an activist, who was known for her public protests and expression against the establishment, passed peacefully in her sleep. Understandably so since she achieved her sole aim in life, the advancement of women.