369. The First British Indians: The Suffragette Princess (Ep 1)

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Duleep Singh in England: Favourite, Then Financial Prisoner

At 13:40 · chapter starts 11:40

Unable to marry anyone suitable in Britain because he is 'too brown', Duleep Singh travels to a Cairo mission to find a bride — returning with Bamba Müller, the 16-year-old daughter of a German merchant and an Abyssinian woman described at the time as a slave and mistress. He creates a grand quasi-Mughal estate at Elveden on the Norfolk-Suffolk border, designed with Sikh and Mughal visual references. But behind the splendour lies financial humiliation: the India Office controls every penny, returning his invoices and refusing to pay his gambling debts. Queen Victoria's former 'darling' has to write to bureaucrats for every fiver he wants to bet at Newmarket. Anand reads from one of his furious letters to the Queen: 'From childhood I have been absolutely in the hands of the government without a will or independent action of my own.' The stage is set for his eventual rebellion.