Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary

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Anand has presented the BBC Radio 4 show Midweek, and on television she has been a presenter on the Heaven and Earth Show. She has co-presented the Daily Politics on BBC Two with Andrew Neil from September 2008, with a break for maternity leave from January to September 2010. Laura says: I love Louise O'Neill. She's a beautiful Irish writer who came to prominence a few years ago for her novel, Asking For It. It was an appropriate place to begin, because Anand, an experienced political journalist, knows the parliamentary scene well. There may also be a degree of identification between author and subject. Both were born in London but with family history from the same part of India; as Anand remarked in an online interview with Gargi Gupta, "she was Punjabi, as am I". She further explained that her own interest in Sophia originated in a 1913 photograph of her selling The Suffragette newspaper outside Hampton Court (where the princess lived in a royal grace-and-favour house, much to the chagrin of the authorities as her activism increased). In researching the book, Anand drew upon the papers of Sophia’s father, Maharajah Duleep Singh, as well as intelligence and police records detailing links with suffragettes and Indian nationalist leaders. By a nice irony, she pointed out, it was the very thoroughness of British bureaucracy that enabled Sophia’s story to be fully told for the first time (www.dnaindia.com 18 January 2015).

Anita Anand’s book focuses on Sophia (right), the youngest of Duleep’s sixth children from his first marriage (he had two other children from his second marriage as well as, according to Anand, children out of marriage). Quiet and unassuming in many ways, Sophia nevertheless mirrored in her own life many of the tremors running through British society. After a spell of acting the debutante, in thrall to the demands of British aristocracy and Parisian fashion, living in one of a number of grace-and favour apartments at Hampton Court that were usually handed out to relatives of men who had martyred themselves in the colonial cause, Sophia took up, in succession, cycling, smoking and entering dogs in contests. But as the pleasures of the turn of the century brought in their wake various manifestations of social and political crisis, her attention turned to other things. The mistreatment of sailors from India known as lascars, the plight of subcontinental soldiers caught in the trenches of the first world war and the cause of Indian self-determination would capture varying levels of her attention. Until October 2007, Anand presented in the 10:00pm till 1:00am slot on Monday to Thursdays on BBC Radio 5 Live. She went on to co-present the station's weekday Drive (4:00–7:00pm) slot with Peter Allen, having replaced Jane Garvey in 2007. Aasmah Mir replaced her when she left for maternity leave. [6] Anand was then on maternity leave for the first of her two children (Hari,12 and Ravi, 8) with husband Simon Singh, a scientist and science writer. She became intrigued by the rare and forgotten Indian suffragette in this old photo. “Sophia Duleep Singh had this fascinating story, as the daughter of the last Sikh ruler of Punjab, Maharajah Duleep Singh — also the man who was compelled to hand over the Kohinoor to British forces. As a Punjabi myself, I felt I had to tell this story.” It turned out to not be very hard to dig up unusual information on Singh. “People didn’t know anything about her. Everything was new. And I was very happy to find people who were still alive who had known her,” Anand says. “Those people brought to life what I was learning in dusty files and once-classified documents in British archives. Those people made her real.” From the debris of her father’s defalcated dynasty (a Game of Thrones-esque story in itself), Sophia channelled her fury into becoming the patron saint of the underdog. She built shelters for neglected migrant workers, treated wounded Indian soldiers (more than a million of whom fought for Britain in the First World War), and battled for the advancement of women both British and Indian.Sophia’s letters are gone, but the author has found people who lived with her during the Second World War, evacuees and children and the housemaid. What they have to say is revealing. The book covers the entire lives of all the family members. I also enjoyed the structure of the biography, the narrative, almost novelistic structure to this book made it really interesting to read. The book also covers the topic of Indian Independence and other defining moments of history involving Britain and the Indian subcontinent, including some causes which Sophia herself worked towards supporting.

Wow, I really loved this book. All the way through, except for the very beginning, which now in retrospect I think was good. I was going to give the book four stars. By the end, I realized I had come to know Sophia so very well and I liked her so very much that I simply had to give the book five stars. I was happy that the author focused on Princess Sophia Alexandra Duleep Singh (1876 – 1948), even though any of the siblings could have been the focus of a book. Museum of Richmond exhibition: Celebrating 800 years of St Mary Magdalene at the heart of Richmond". Richmond Local History Society. July 2019 . Retrieved 8 August 2021. Anand, Anita (27 September 2005). "At the heart of a heated debate". BBC News . Retrieved 21 October 2021.

Summary

Sophia was an important woman suffragette, a lover of dogs, a caring woman. Her oldest sister Bamba consistently bristled with antagonism. Catherine, the next oldest, settled herself with a female lover in Germany and never saw eye-to-eye over Sophia’s menagerie of dogs. Even if all three sisters and the brothers, Victor and Freddie and Eddie, were as different as siblings can be, they loved each other. You felt this. You see them spar against each other, grumble and joke. They are family, with all that implies. There are half-sisters too! You follow this entire family. This story is told with a ton of context, starting with Ranjit Singh, the Lion of Punjab, and filling in Gandhi's activities and the struggle for Indian independence. I needed this because despite studying British history up to the age of 18, I had precisely no (that's zero) lessons covering India, an entire continent that the British stole which had a gigantic influence on economics, history, immigration. Amazing, isn't it.

This is fiction, but it's loosely based on things that have happened in the past. It's about this woman whose body is found after this big party on a little fictional island in West Cork. It's uncomfortable to read but compulsive - you can't put it down. I absolutely devoured it. This young girl's body is found and no one's ever arrested, but there's this understanding that the small community know who did it. And then 10 years later, this film crew comes along to make a documentary about the murder and it all kind of unravels. These questions have yielded three books so far, and the popular ongoing podcast Empire, which Anand co-hosts with the historian William Dalrymple.

Nicol, Patricia (22 August 2022). "The best podcasts on the British Empire and East India Company". The Times. London. ISSN 0140-0460 . Retrieved 31 August 2022. The part of the book I found the most touching was a memory of the daughter of the elderly Princess' housekeeper. After his death, the British used the confusion surrounding his heirs' succession to move into the area. Most of the adult heirs died suspiciously. When it was over, the ruler of this prosperous area was an 1o year old boy, Duleep. His mother was very politically astute so the British had her exiled from the country and then forced the child-king to sign over his lands and the symbol of his rule, the Kor-i-Noor diamond. History isn’t just about dates and events. It’s about human beings doing things to other human beings and I am completely compelled by this,” Anand says.