Sophia Duleep Singh

Chelsea

Sophia Duleep Singh was born to a prestigious family in England, the daughter of the last maharaja of the Sikh Empire on the Indian subcontinent and the goddaughter of Queen Victoria. Her immense privilege protected her in many ways, though not in every way. Her father, deeply unhappy over being forced to abdicate his kingdom in Northern India and his subsequent exile to England by the British Raj, abandoned his family. Her mother suffered from alcoholism and died while taking care of an ill eleven-year-old Sophia. Still, given her wealth and position, few people would likely have guessed then that Princess Sophia would one day become a leader in the suffrage movement—probably least of all Sophia herself.

Growing up in the late 1880s in England, Sophia immersed herself in her studies with private tutors and focused her free time on her two passions: fashion and dogs. As a young woman on one overseas voyage, Sophia insisted on traveling with her dogs close at hand, feeding them “fine cuts of meat and the occasional nip of brandy.” She posed for newspaper photographers, danced at debutante balls, and rode a bicycle in public, scandalizing the rest of the aristocracy as one of the few women to do so at the time.

“Taxation without representation is a tyranny.… I am unable to pay money to the state as I am not allowed to exercise any control over its expenditure.”

—SOPHIA DULEEP SINGH

But then, as Anita Anand, author of Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, said, something changed. In 1903, at the age of twenty-seven, Sophia traveled to India and saw for the first time the brutality of life under the British Raj. She was shocked by the racism, famine, and poverty. Though she hadn’t understood what life was like in India for the vast majority of people, her paternal grandmother, Jind Kaur—a gutsy woman in her own right—had spent her life organizing the Sikh resistance to British rule and was even imprisoned for her political activities. As for Sophia, she returned to England “with this sense of fire in her,” as Anand said, and had made up her mind “that it is not right to have equals treated as underclasses, be they brown or be they female.”

At the time, British suffragettes were ramping up their organizing to demand votes for women, and expanding their use of more aggressive tactics: throwing rocks and bricks through windows, tossing nails under tires in the streets, interrupting speeches by political figures. In 1908, Sophia met Una Dugdale, a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union, a group founded five years earlier by suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst. Sophia signed up as a member the same day. Within a year, she had become one of the organization’s “tax resisters,” refusing to pay taxes to a government that denied women representation. (Their slogan was straight to the point: “No vote, no tax.”) As a result, some of her possessions were confiscated and sold, only to be bought back for Sophia by her fellow suffragettes.

Sophia joined Emmeline and hundreds of other suffragettes as they stormed the House of Commons in 1910 on a day that would become known as Black Friday. It wasn’t the suffragettes’ actions that earned the moniker: Police and bystanders attacked the suffragettes for six hours; more than two dozen women reported being sexually assaulted. Sophia leaped in between a petite woman and a police officer, shouting at him to let her go. Once the police officer recognized the woman who was screaming at him, he tried to slip away into the crowd. Sophia chased after him, demanding that he tell her his badge number. He refused, but she saw it and memorized it. She wrote to the home secretary at the time, Winston Churchill, demanding the officer be taken off duty. After exchanging multiple letters, he left a note on her file: “Send no further reply to her.”

While other suffragettes were being sent to prison, Sophia took part in one demonstration after another but couldn’t seem to get herself charged with a crime, likely because of her relationship to the royal family. In 1911, Sophia was arrested after she threw her body at the prime minister’s car, carrying a banner that read “Give Women the Vote,” but no police officer wanted to be responsible for mistreating Queen Victoria’s goddaughter. Over and over, she was released without being charged, even though she was more than willing to join the other suffragettes who were going on hunger strikes in prison, risking their lives for the cause.

Sophia brought the fight for voting rights to her own home, often standing outside her Hampton Court apartment (given to her by Queen Victoria), selling copies of The Suffragette. (After seeing Sophia’s photo in the magazine, one high-ranking aristocrat wondered whether anything would be done to “stop her.”) Other suffragettes saw the potential publicity they could gain from having a princess as a member, and urged Sophia to take a more prominent role, but she refused, not wanting her privilege to further protect her or her celebrity to obscure their mission. When she was asked to speak at a glitzy suffrage fund-raiser, she agreed only after the organizers’ repeated insistence. “I will come on the 9th to the meeting with pleasure,” she wrote. “I hope you have found someone else to support the resolution, if not I will do so, but very much prefer not to and I shall only say about 5 words!” When it came to the cause to which she dedicated her life, she preferred to stay out of the spotlight and in the crowds. That’s exactly where she was in February 1918, when the Representation of the People Act was passed, giving property-owning British women over thirty the right to vote, and again in 1928, when another piece of legislation enfranchised every British citizen age twenty-one and older.

Sophia’s advocacy extended beyond suffrage. During World War I, she raised money to buy good-quality uniforms for Indian soldiers and advocated for their rights. She also volunteered as a nurse, caring for the wounded on the home front. But after the war and success in securing voting rights, when her “sister suffragettes” returned to their lives, Sophia felt lost, lonely, aimless, and in search of another cause. She struggled with depression for decades, finding another calling only after World War II broke out, when she began caring for her goddaughter (her housekeeper’s child) and three refugee children she’d taken in.

It wasn’t just Sophia’s reluctance that kept her out of the public spotlight or out of history books. The British government worked hard to keep her name out of the headlines, in order to avoid embarrassing the monarchy, and much of the British suffrage movement was led by white British women, for white British women. Still, Sophia was far from the only British Indian woman who worked to enfranchise women in the UK. And while she often went unrecognized for her activism during her life, her name now appears on a monument in Parliament Square, alongside her fellow suffragettes. The monument was unveiled in 2018, one hundred years after the first British women could vote and 108 years after Sophia and other suffragettes were harassed, beaten, and assaulted nearby.