The Punjabi Princess Who Took On the British Empire

Sophia Duleep Singh knew how to make a spectacle of contradiction. In one arresting image, the princess stands outside Hampton Court Palace in 1913 selling copies of The Suffragette, in support of winning British women the right to vote. Enveloped in expensive furs, she stands beside a signboard, a satchel around her waist, looking very serious.

That moment caused a massive scandal for the British Royal Family — after all, she was Queen Victoria’s goddaughter. In Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, Anita Anand writes that, indeed, it “pushed King George V over the edge,” to the point he wanted to throw Sophia out of Hampton Court. But of course, he couldn’t. Royal by birth and radical by choice, Sophia weaponized the very visibility the British Empire had handed her. 

Over 100 years after this scandalous incident, it’s important to reexamine her story. Her complexity made it easy to erase her from history books and reduce her to a woman fighting for voting rights. But Sophia Duleep Singh was much more than that. She was diasporic before the term existed, code-switching through often conflicting identities, but never forgetting where she came from. Forced to obey the British, who had stolen everything from her family (including the Koh-i-noor!), she found new ways to constantly rebel against them — and succeeded.