London exhibit tells story of Punjab’s last princesses

BRITISH Indian historian, author and art collector Peter Bance has loaned a major part of his extensive Maharaja Duleep Singh collection for a new royal exhibition in London, themed on the Sikh ruler’s daughters and set to open later this month.

The Last Princesses of Punjab at Kens­ington Palaceat Kens­ington Palace will revolve around Prin­cess Sophia Duleep Singh and her life as an activist for women’s voting rights as a suffragette in 20th century England.

Catherine Duleep Singh with her German governess and lover Fraulein Schäfe@PeterBance

The exhibition will also put the spot­light on her Indian princess sisters, her German mother Bamba Muller, grand­mother Maharani Jind Kaur and god­mother Queen Victoria as influences in her life. This year marks Sophia’s 150th birth anniversary.

“Princess Sophia Duleep Singh is best known as a suffragette who fought for women’s right to vote, using her position to further the cause,” said Historic Royal Palaces, the charity that cares for Eng­land’s palaces.

“Along with her sisters Catherine and Bamba, Sophia inherited a rich but com­plex heritage from both sides of her fam­ily. The women expressed and connected to this in different ways,” it said. The Kensington Palace exhibition opens on March 25.

It coincides with the launch of Bance’s new book The Last Royals of Lahore: The Duleep Singhs, a coffee-table tome packed with newly discovered archive material and exclusive firsthand accounts from those who knew this British Punjabi royal family intimately.

Princess Sophia as a baby with her mother, Maharani BambaPeter Bance

“This is my third instalment on the Du­leep Singh family, published to coincide with the exhibition at Kensington Palace and just as that focuses on the females, the emphasis of the book is also on the females of the royal durbar,” said Bance.

“The book has a chapter on each mem­ber of the family of the last Sikh Maharaja of Punjab, then the kingdom of Lahore, covering his five daughters and three sons,” he said. The book’s foreword is writ­ten by singer-actor Satinder Sartaj, with whom Bance collaborated for the film on Duleep Singh’s life story ‘The Black Prince’.

A bound copy of The Suffragette newspaper.

Among the new information to emerge is Catherine’s role as a saviour of dozens of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany – earning her the reference ‘Punjabi Schindler’. Bance’s new book also delves into the lesser-known facts around Prince Victor Duleep Singh’s association with the Ghadar Party and Indian revolutionaries in Germany during the First World War.

Duleep Singh’s other son, Prince Fred­erick, by contrast, lived the life of an Eng­lish Squire dedicated to saving churches and heritage buildings from closure.

Sophia at a suffrage dinnerClaire Collins

“Everything in the book is from actual documents from archives or directly from Duleep Singh’s personal papers which I obtained,” the author said. “While I have written in depth about his life in my pre­vious books, it is Maharaja Duleep Singh’s life in England that I have really elabo­rated on in this book – especially at Elve­den (in the East Anglia region of England) and in Scotland, where he had a number of estates.

“It covers his sporting life, his personal issues and financial difficulties ... every­thing from official documents, so there’s no hearsay or myths,” he said.

Duleep Singh, the son and heir of Ma­haraja Ranjit Singh, was exiled to England as a teenager in 1854.

Bance has documented his history ev­er since a chance visit to the Duleep Sin­gh’s grave at a churchyard in Elveden, Suffolk, as a young student.

“For the Indian diaspora, we can relate to this family because it was one of the first Punjabi/Indian families of mixed race, and they kept to their Punjabi roots. Although they were very religious, church­going Christians, they never forgot their roots and made immense contributions to life in the UK – just as the Indian commu­nity continues to do today,” he said. His historic collection on Duleep Singh has been on permanent display at a museum in Thetford, Norfolk, for a few years now.

Last weekend, the collection marked a major new milestone when it was un­veiled as part of a new permanent Duleep Singh Gallery at the museum.

Meanwhile, the items on display at Kensington Palace are expected to travel to Canada for an exhibition after the UK run ends in November.