On the afternoon of 16th November 1910 three hundred suffragettes left Caxton Hall in London in a fiery mood. Their plan was to march through the winter streets to the House of Commons. Marching shoulder to shoulder with Emmeline Pankhurst at the head of the procession was Sophia Duleep Singh - princess-in-exile, suffragette and revolutionary.
Born in 1876 Sophia Duleep Singh was a dispossessed princess of one of the greatest and most defiant empires of the Indian subcontinent. Her father Maharajah Duleep Singh, was heir to the Kingdom of the Sikhs, a realm that included the mighty cities of Lahore and Peshawar, stretching from the lush Kashmir Valley to the craggy foothills of the Khyber Pass. It was an empire irresistible to the British, who took everything, including the fabled Kohinoor diamond. Sophia's mother was the illegitimate daughter of a German businessman and an Abyssinian slave and her godmother was Queen Victoria.
Brought up in Elvedon in Norfolk, in a house transformed to resemble a Maharajah's palace replete with exotic animals, Sophia was raised to be as genteel as any upper-class Englishwoman, presented at court, living later at Hampton Court Palace, filling the society pages with her new fashions. But at the age of thirty-one, in 1907, she went secretly to India and returned a revolutionary. Her causes were to be the struggle for Indian Independence; the fate of the Lascars; the welfare of Indian soldiers in the First World War - and the fight for female suffrage.
Carefully researched and passionately written, this is an enthralling story of an extraordinary woman who lived through some of the most eventful times in British and Indian history.
