Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary

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In 1876 Sophia Duleep Singh was born into royalty. Her father, Maharajah Duleep Singh, was heir to the Kingdom of the Sikhs, a realm that stretched from the lush Kashmir Valley to the craggy foothills of the Khyber Pass and included the mighty cities of Lahore and Peshawar. It was a territory irresistible to the British, who plundered everything, including the fabled Koh-I-Noor diamond. Anand has presented the BBC Radio 4 show Midweek, and on television she has been a presenter on the Heaven and Earth Show. She has co-presented the Daily Politics on BBC Two with Andrew Neil from September 2008, with a break for maternity leave from January to September 2010.

Her involvement with the Indian independence movement was limited by her life in England, but she still knew and supported prominent pre-war campaigners for political reform. The accounts of her visits to India give really interesting insight into colonial India. She never lived there, although one of her older sisters settled in Lahore. Throughout her life Sophia’s relationships with her five siblings were deeply important to her, something conveyed very well in this biography. She also loved animals and bred dogs, with a particular fondness for pomeranians. I appreciated the unconventional lives of all three sisters: Sophia never married, Catherine settled in Germany with a female life partner, and Bamba attempted to become a doctor in American before moving to India. The British colonial authorities were so concerned about the destabilising effect the family’s influence could have on the Punjab that for decades they were forbidden from going to India at all. When they did, their activities were closely (and clumsily) monitored by the colonial authorities. During WWI Sophia became a volunteer nurse and fundraiser for Indian troops; during WWII she sheltered evacuees. Delightfully, Anand was able to speak to the evacuees themselves for this book. The detail that Sophia made a little girl promise to always use her vote is very moving. She opened the 2014 Kolkata Book Fair and has also appeared at the Jaipur Literature Festival, most recently in January 2015. The extraordinary life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, in her own words Frida: Fiery, fierce and passionateAnand, Anita (2019). The Patient Assassin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge and the Raj. Simon and Schuster (UK) Scribner (US), ISBN 9781471174216. It is based on the life of Indian revolutionary Udham Singh and the Amritsar massacre of 1919. [13] We learned about the Suffrage movement at school, and also some of the prominent figures that spearheaded the movement and pushed for progress for the advancement of women and their rights, specifically the right to vote.

After training as a journalist, Anand became European Head of News and Current Affairs for Zee TV, and one of the youngest TV news editors in Britain at the age of 25. [5] She presented the talk show The Big Debate and was political correspondent for Zee TV presenting the Raj Britannia series – 31 documentaries chronicling the political aspirations of the Asian community in the most marginal constituencies in 1997. Also also, did you know concentration camps were invented in South Africa by a British commander to use primarily against the Boers? And that Gandhi learned about hunger strikes from suffragettes in British prisons? What do you do if you are the daughter of an estranged Indian royal family marooned in the heart of late-Victorian and Edwardian London? You join the ranks of the various revolutionaries and other assorted malcontents, while maintaining social proprieties to the very end. Bio of Indian suffragette Princess Sophia Duleep Singh. This is an absolutely amazing story. Sophia was the daughter of Duleep Singh, the last maharaja of the Sikh empire who was forced to sign over his power to the British Raj as a boy. She was brought up in England, god-daughter of Queen, yet still treated like a second class citizen, and she found her purpose in fighting alongside the suffragettes. She tried her hardest to get arrested, used her power for publicity, and then when war broke out she made a spectacular contribution to funds for sepoys (Indian soldiers, grossly underequipped by the British) and worked as a nurse for Sikh soldiers. All this while suffering from lifelong and dreadful depression and a spectacularly terrible family life.

Her first book, Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, a biography of a campaigner for women’s suffrage and Indian independence, was published in 2015. The biography is well written. It is readable and engrossing. Most importantly it includes just the right level of historical detail (on the operation of the Raj, the burgeoning Indian independence movement and the Suffragette movement) alongside the biographical detail to keep the account hugely informative (the book would for example serve as an inside account of each of those areas in its own right) while not detracting from the central story.

Until October 2007, Anand presented in the 10:00pm till 1:00am slot on Monday to Thursdays on BBC Radio 5 Live. She went on to co-present the station's weekday Drive (4:00–7:00pm) slot with Peter Allen, having replaced Jane Garvey in 2007. Aasmah Mir replaced her when she left for maternity leave. [6] Wow, I really loved this book. All the way through, except for the very beginning, which now in retrospect I think was good. I was going to give the book four stars. By the end, I realized I had come to know Sophia so very well and I liked her so very much that I simply had to give the book five stars. I was happy that the author focused on Princess Sophia Alexandra Duleep Singh (1876 – 1948), even though any of the siblings could have been the focus of a book. It was an appropriate place to begin, because Anand, an experienced political journalist, knows the parliamentary scene well. There may also be a degree of identification between author and subject. Both were born in London but with family history from the same part of India; as Anand remarked in an online interview with Gargi Gupta, "she was Punjabi, as am I". She further explained that her own interest in Sophia originated in a 1913 photograph of her selling The Suffragette newspaper outside Hampton Court (where the princess lived in a royal grace-and-favour house, much to the chagrin of the authorities as her activism increased). In researching the book, Anand drew upon the papers of Sophia’s father, Maharajah Duleep Singh, as well as intelligence and police records detailing links with suffragettes and Indian nationalist leaders. 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.dnaindia.com 18 January 2015). Anita Anand has definitively restored to history one of the most important and charismatic figures in the suffragette movement. This thoroughly absorbing and deftly informative account instantly pulled me into the irresistible adventure and vitality of Sophia Duleep Singh's defiant and innovative existence. Anand's timely biography is a wonderful testament to Sophia's lifetime of commitment to Indian independence and the advancement of women, and to the range and courage of her achievements Sophia is so well researched that this is likely to remain a definitive account ... Anand's passion shines * Daily Express *

The Kor-i-noor is the diamond in the center of the front cross on this crown. This is what reading nonfiction gets you. It gets you yelling at the news in an very angry, yet informed, way. Anand, Anita (2015). Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1408835456.