The narrative of her life includes a period of trying to fit in with the superficial social whirl, before she became disillusioned and began using her wealth and influence to agitate for social change. In part, this may reflect its own unease with the character it has chosen to make central in movements that were far larger than her. Her body was cremated and her ashes were scattered in India—thus were the wishes of a woman who, despite residing in Britain all of her life, had never felt entirely at home there. It does go into quite graphic detail about situations, but also talks about the impact of his experiences and what he's learned.

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. Although Sophia and her vicissitudes naturally take centre stage in its narration, Anand’s book can also be read as a women’s group biography. Giving details on the development of Sikh traditions, revolutionary ferment in the Indian subcontinent, the British suffrage movement, the First World War, and the partition of India and Pakistan, Anand presents a comprehensive and valuable historical biography. The BBC broadcaster Anita Anand tells the beguiling story of Sophia Duleep Singh, from exile in the Suffolk country estate of Elveden to the suffragette battleground of Westminster, via various trips to her ancestors’ home.Anand brings her out from the back of the stage, as it were, to reveal Sophia’s involvements in two key historical movements: women’s rights and Indian independence.

As an example, if there is a weak point it is the largely sympathetic account of Sophia and her family and their complaints to the authorities about their hardships (normally that their allowances, despite being huge multiples of standard wages, and which have largely been frittered on at best extravagances and at worse dissolute living) are inadequate. 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. It posed as a friend, offering to help protect the young King Duleep from external threats, and then forced him and his mother, the formidable Jindan Kaur, into exile in Britain, separating him from everything he knew. Biographies of such ghostly figures can be done well, as Hallie Rubenhold did in THE FIVE, on the lives of the victims of Jack the Ripper.