A NEW exhibition opening at Kensington Palace later this month will tell the story of three Indian princesses whose lives touched the Holocaust, the suffragette movement and Queen Victoria herself.
The Last Princesses of Punjab opens on March 26 and focuses on Catherine Duleep Singh and her sisters Sophia and Bamba — daughters of Duleep Singh, the last maharajah of the Sikh Empire, who was deposed at ten years old in 1848 and exiled to Britain and Europe.
The centrepiece of the show is a pendant that has never been displayed in public before. It belonged to Ursula Hornstein, a Jewish girl whose family fled Nazi Germany in 1939, and was a gift from Catherine, who had sponsored the family's escape to Britain, reported the Times.
According to reports, the story behind it began with a chance meeting in a doctor's surgery in Kassel, Germany, in 1938. Catherine was living in the city at the time. A woman named Ilse Hornstein happened to be in the same waiting room and began telling a stranger that her husband was being held in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The stranger was Catherine. She offered almost immediately to act as the family's guarantor for British immigration.
Ilse then entered the local Gestapo offices disguised as a secretary and secured her husband's release on the grounds of his First World War service. The family reached England in 1939. Catherine later gave Ursula the pendant when she converted to Christianity. Analysis suggested it may date from the mid-19th century and could have been a family heirloom.
Catherine also sponsored several other individuals and families fleeing Germany. Dozens of people alive today owe their lives to her. She died in Buckinghamshire in 1942.
The exhibition will also display Ursula's childhood passport, stamped with multiple swastikas, and items connected to the sisters' grandmother Jind Kaur, the last maharani of Punjab, including a portrait painted by British artist George Richmond in 1862 and the earrings she wore when she sat for it.
Sophia Duleep Singh, whose godmother was Queen Victoria, became a prominent suffragette. She was photographed selling The Suffragette newspaper outside Hampton Court Palace and spoilt her 1911 census form with the words "No vote, no census."
The third sister, Bamba, returned to live in Lahore in the 1940s and in 1948 wrote a letter laying claim to the lands the British had taken from her family.
Michael Bowles, Ursula's son, told the Times it was an "honour and a privilege" to share the family's history. "The pendant is a real treasure — it was a keepsake for my mother and it symbolises to us what kindness and generosity mean," he said. "I just hope that refugees in similar situations would be treated with the same kindness."
Polly Putnam, curator of the exhibition, said: "They're fundamentally fascinating people. By focusing in on this extraordinary family, we get to touch on various aspects of history."
