Podbit · Empire: World History
When Bamba settled in Lahore, the nationalists had not forgotten who she was. Gopal Krishna Gokhale — Gandhi's own teacher — paid his respects, as did Lala Lajpat Rai. Most strikingly, Bamba was secretly meeting Saraladevi Chaudhrani, niece of Nobel laureate Tagore, who ran military training camps for Indians fighting the British.
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The British authorities had assumed that, since everyone had forgotten about the Duleep Singhs, Bamba in Lahore was harmless. They were wrong. The Indian National Congress had not forgotten. Gopal Krishna Gokhale — Gandhi's teacher and the reason Gandhi returned to India — came to pay his respects. So did Lala Lajpat Rai, the firebrand architect of Swadeshi self-reliance, who deplored the colonial depredations continuing across the country. And then there was the mystery meeting. One day when Sophia was visiting, she returned from a ride to find a woman waiting patiently on the veranda — a woman who made such an impression that Sophia wrote about her in her diary with careful, almost deliberately obscured terms. Anita traced this 'nice Bengali woman' back to Saraladevi Chaudhrani — niece of Tagore, described in intelligence files as 'a very dangerous woman' — who ran military training camps where participants chanted the names of revolutionaries, including Maharaja Ranjit Singh himself. This was the company Bamba kept. It was through Bamba that Sophia, too, was politicised.
Bamba had spent her life railing against the British establishment — yet in 1915 she married a white Australian Raj surgeon 20 years her senior. The reason was brutally practical: it unlocked a £10,000 dowry the British government held, and gave her the legal cover to stay in Lahore permanently.
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