Sophia
Author: Anita Anand
Publisher: Bloomsbury, Rs599
Anita Anand’s debut work, Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, is a groundbreaking effort which triumphantly reveals an important chapter and character of Indian history which remained unmentioned till now, says ANKITA ARORA
Indian history continues to remain mischievous as its multi-faceted dimensions are yet to be fully revealed. Many stories from the past still need to be told and offered a literary space. The unearthing of historical events in the 21st century is something which is capable of drawing the attention of all those interested in the activities of the past. Anita Anand’s debut work, Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, is a groundbreaking effort which triumphantly reveals an important chapter and character of Indian history which remained unmentioned till now. With an eye of a keen historian, Anand has found an almost unbelievable true story that every writer wishes to come across.
The eponymous lead of Anand’s work is, as titled, a princess, a royal suffragette, and a revolutionary. The three parts of the book, bracketed with both a prologue and an epilogue, explore the travails of Sophia Duleep Singh, a Punjabi princess, from her birth till death. Sophia, granddaughter of the greatest ruler the Punjab had ever known, Maharajah Ranjit Singh, “Sher-e-Punjab”, and the youngest daughter of Maharajah Duleep Singh, was born into royalty in the year 1876. Duleep reserved a special affection for his youngest one and made sure that Queen Victoria becomes her godmother. Therefore, owing to not just a simple relationship between the Queen and herself, but a major responsibility of being a goddaughter to the Queen, “Sophia had been trained from an early age to maintain her poise and nerve no matter how uncomfortable the situation.” She was trained to have a calm and confident gaze “even though events all around her were building with frenzy.” She always made sure that her presence was felt.
Meticulously researched, Anand offers the readers with a horrible inevitability of dislocation and dispossession that haunts the Duleep Singh clan for innumerable years. After the demise of Ranjit Singh, who in the late 1840s had seen the Sikh kingdom, an irresistible territory to the British, lose its footing and slip into the hands of the British Raj through deceit and treachery, it was Sophia’s father who was snatched away from his mother Maharani Jindan. The unmistaken heir to his father’s Sikh kingdom, Duleep was taken into the protective guardianship of Queen Victoria. “From the very moment he set foot in her court, Duleep became Queen Victoria’s favourite.” Seized from his family, taken away from a kingdom which stretched from the luxuriant Kashmir Valley to the Khyber Pass, and property which included the fabled Koh-I-Noor diamond, Maharajah Duleep Singh is reduced to nothing but an exotic pet to Queen Victoria. She called him her “beautiful boy”, made him dress in “silk pyjamas” and pose for portraits with “a decorative sword hanging at his waist.” With nightmarish inescapability, his later life would be an orgy of drinking, infidelity, disloyalty and plots against the British.
It is Sophia who rightfully carries forward the name of her grandfather. Although she was forever called the daughter of “that man”, “the traitor”, “the one who had lost everything”, she was undoubtedly the granddaughter of the greatest descendent of warriors the Punjab had ever known. Since childhood Sophia was spied upon by invisible eyes for Duleep Singh’s blood runs through her veins. Nevertheless, she turns out to be an extraordinary individual who dons multifarious roles in a life extremely crucial to the defining moments of British and Indian history.
Even though shy in nature, she contributed a lot to the suffrage movement without even knowing it. From the moment she took ownership of her shiny new ‘Columbia Model 41 ladies Safety Bicycle’, “she was throwing in her lot with the burgeoning women’s suffrage movement.” Her purchase inspired an American suffragette so much that she went on to state that the bicycle “had done more to emancipate women... [as] it gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance.” All thanks to Sophia, women riding on bicycles became the picture of free and untrammelled womanhood.
later in life, she volunteered as a nurse during the First World War taking up the cause of the Indian soldiers. Punjabi patients could not believe that they were being treated by their beloved princess. While nursing the troops, Sophia raised funds for warm clothes and huts for Indian soldiers as well.
Apart from her active roles in society, she was also a champion dog-breeder and a formidable horsewoman. Her love of animals is the other side of the coin throwing light on her shy, loving and caring nature.
Undoubtedly, in her roles as an uprooted heiress to a lost kingdom, a revered goddaughter to the most powerful hand of the 19th century, a nurse during the First World War, a belligerent suffragette, and a strong feminist, Sophia is thoroughly a ‘Koh-I-Noor’ of a subject.
With helpful pictorial evidence, copious ‘Notes to Pages’ and an abundant Bibliography, Anand too dons many hats similar to the central figure of her work. As a historian, a journalist, a reporter, and a chronicler, she rescues Princess Sophia from an unimaginable oblivion in which a petrified Raj attempted to conceal her. In doing so, she uncovers the agonising shrewdness with which the imperial Britain sought to eliminate everything they thought would harm them in future.
The reviewer is a PhD Research Scholar in Comparative Indian literature in Delhi University