She was Queen Victoria’s goddaughter, a Punjabi princess living in a grace-and-favour home at Hampton Court. She wore Parisian gowns, bred championship dogs, lived a royally lavish life and moved easily through the drawing rooms of Edwardian England.
And then, two trips to India changed everything. Princess Sophia Duleep Singh — granddaughter of Ranjit Singh, the legendary Lion of Punjab — went on to become one of the most consequential, and most overlooked, figures in the history of women’s rights. Hers is a story of displacement, defiance, and an empire turned upside down.
A kingdom stolen, a princess born in exile
Sophia was born on 8 August 1876 in Belgravia, London — far from the golden courts of Lahore that her family had once ruled. Her father, Maharaja Duleep Singh, was the last Sikh ruler of Punjab, a boy-king who had been forced, at just 10 years old, to abdicate his throne to the East India Company, convert to Christianity and hand over the Koh-i-Noor diamond to Lord Dalhousie.
Exiled to England at 15, he spent the rest of his life in a state of gilded grief, eventually reconverting to Sikhism and throwing his support behind the Indian independence movement. Queen Victoria, who had taken something of a maternal interest in the deposed maharaja, became godmother to several of his children, including Sophia.
Growing up, Sophia was shielded from the worst of her inheritance — the loss and dispossession, the fury. As Historic Royal Palaces notes in its records on her life, she enjoyed a fashionable existence: dressed in the latest fashions from Paris, frequent parties, photography sojourns, and cycling. But that ease concealed a deeper restlessness.
The India trip that lit the fire
In 1903, Sophia and her sister Bamba made a secret journey to India to attend the Delhi Durbar — a grand imperial assembly marking Edward VII’s coronation — despite the British government’s wishes. She saw the spectacle of empire up close, but was largely snubbed by British officials. It was a first crack in the gilded surface of her life in England.
She returned to India in 1907, and this visit proved irreversible in its impact. Travelling to Lahore and Amritsar, she saw the poverty that British rule had wrought on ordinary Indians and visited places important to her family’s heritage, meeting relatives who still revered the Duleep Singh name.
Most significantly, she encountered key figures in India’s independence movement — among them Lala Lajpat Rai and Gopal Krishna Gokhale — whose words left a lasting mark on her.
As journalist and biographer Anita Anand writes in her 2015 biography Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, the princess had been “seduced by the struggle for justice” and from that point could not be silent. She returned to England a transformed woman. The socialite was gone. In her place stood an activist.
Black Friday and the battle for the vote
In 1908, Sophia joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), the militant wing of the suffragette movement co-founded by Emmeline Pankhurst. She began selling copies of The Suffragette newspaper outside Faraday House, her grace-and-favour home on the Hampton Court estate — a pointed act of defiance, given that the very ground she stood on had been granted to her family by the Crown.
She funded the movement, spoke at branch meetings of the Richmond WSPU, and joined the Women’s Tax Resistance League, refusing to pay taxes to a government in which she had no representation. The government seized a pearl necklace, a gold bangle, and a diamond ring from her across two separate occasions in 1911.
Her most defining moment came on 18 November 1910 — a day now known in suffragette history as Black Friday. Sophia was among more than 300 women who marched from Caxton Hall to Parliament Square demanding to meet the Prime Minister.
The Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, ordered their expulsion. According to Historic Royal Palaces, over six hours, 200 women were physically assaulted by police; two later died from their injuries. Sophia stood at the frontline. King George V was reportedly so frustrated by her activism that he asked an aide: “Have we no hold on her?”
The answer, as it turned out, was no.
A life in service — to two nations
Sophia’s activism was never confined to the vote alone. As records from the London Museum document, she used her wealth and connections to support the Indian community in Britain — visiting the Sikh temple at Shepherd’s Bush, attending functions organised by the India Office, supporting the Indian Women’s Education Association, and helping establish the Lascars Club in east London for South Asian sailors.
When Indian soldiers were stationed at Hampton Court during the First World War, she visited them personally, photographing each one and creating an album in their memory. She also nursed injured soldiers as a Red Cross volunteer.
When the Representation of the People Act 1918 finally granted some women over 30 the right to vote, Sophia joined the Suffragette Fellowship — an organisation formed to preserve the history and memory of the movement. She rose to become its President in 1928, following the death of Emmeline Pankhurst, and remained a member until her death.
She died peacefully on 22 August 1948 — almost exactly a year after India gained independence, a cause she had quietly championed all her life. Her ashes were taken to India.
According to Anand’s biography, in her final years Sophia repeatedly made those close to her swear an oath: “You are never, ever not to vote. You must promise me. When you are allowed to vote, you are never, ever to fail to do so.”
Her name now appears on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square. A blue plaque marks her home at Hampton Court. And she appeared on a Royal Mail commemorative stamp in 2018 — selling The Suffragette, exactly as she had done a century before. A princess who refused to stay in her place, an Indian woman who helped win the vote in Britain. A revolutionary history has taken far too long to remember.