The episode opens with a trio of sponsor reads covering Attio (a CRM platform), the London Review of Books, and BetterHelp's findings that 74% of Americans feel society discourages seeking help. William and Anita then briefly orient listeners: this is part three of a four-part run on the daughters of the last Maharaja of Punjab, following episodes on the better-known Sophia and the reclusive Catherine. Today belongs to Bamba — the one who went home to India and, as William puts it, the one who 'went back to the Punjab.'

Anita sketches Bamba's biography in broad, immediate strokes: born Knightsbridge 1869, died Lahore 1957 — a life stretching from Victorian London to newly created Pakistan. ^{[1] — Anita Arundhati "Born Knightsbridge 1869, died Lahore 1957: Princess Bamba Duleep Singh's life spanned 87 years and three empires, from Victorian London to …" 07:07 Play} The name Bamba means 'pink' in Arabic, given to her mother because the Maharani blushed whenever noticed; this Bamba, Anita jokes, spent her whole life demanding to be noticed and 'kicking up merry hell.' Reports sent to Queen Victoria described the children's characters with unsettling precision: Victor was imperious, Freddie obstinate, Catherine secretive, and Princess Bamba — assessed from the age of three — had the worst temper in the nursery. Her psychology was formed by two absences: a father who was physically present but emotionally distant, who nonetheless filled his children with stories of the Golden Temple, the Lahore Fort, and their grandfather Ranjit Singh, the Lion of Punjab; and a Queen who tolerated the sisters only for Sophia's sake. Bamba absorbed those stories as birthright, following her father in calling Victoria 'Mrs. Fagan — receiver of stolen goods.' ^{[2] — Anita Arundhati "She's the one who decides to refer to Queen Victoria as Mrs. Fagan, as her father did, the receiver of stolen goods, always irked by what w…" 08:23 Play} Against the world, the sisters clung to each other like 'fingers on a fist' — and that psychological fortification would define Bamba's choices for the rest of her remarkable, raging life.

William introduces the Oxford chapter: both Catherine and Bamba attended, but where Catherine passed her exams, Bamba simply did not engage. The photographs from Somerville tell the story without words — she never smiles, she scowls, and the message is consistent: she did not want to do what she was told. Anita is careful to distinguish wilfulness from lack of intelligence. Bamba's refusal to work within established structures was not stupidity; when it was her own idea, when the goal was self-directed, she could demonstrate formidable determination. The tell comes immediately: at the turn of the century, she announced she wanted to become a doctor — an ambition remarkable for any woman in 1899-1900, let alone a mixed-heritage Indian princess in Edwardian Britain.

Unable to study in Britain and barred from India by the authorities who feared a Duleep Singh on the loose in Punjab, Bamba's only realistic option was America — the one English-speaking country where a woman could genuinely obtain a medical degree. On 30 January 1900 she boarded the König Albert, a German ocean liner, headed for San Francisco via Japan. American reporters, primed for an exotic Indian royal, got something very different: a small, unsmiling woman who screamed at them to leave her dogs alone — a Great Dane named Leon and a Russian Wolfhound whose name she refused to divulge. ^{[1] — Anita Arundhati "When Princess Bamba arrived in San Francisco in 1900, reporters were waiting for a charming Indian royal. What they got was a small, dark, …" 12:52 Play} In Chicago, she walked to the Women's Medical College daily through unpaved, frozen streets, pelted with snow by locals, and wrote furiously to the press: 'Such things would never be permitted in England.' She was one of very few non-white women in US medicine in 1901, in a country with fewer than 1,000 medical students in total. She endured nearly three years of this. Then, in the summer of 1902, Northwestern University's trustees ruled — with the direct quote Anita cites — that 'women cannot grasp surgery,' and revoked the possibility of female medical qualifications entirely. ^{[2] — Anita Arundhati "In 1901, Princess Bamba was attending the Women's Medical College in Chicago — one of fewer than 1,000 medical students in all of America a…" 14:00 Play} Bamba had completed her coursework. It was taken from her.

Defeated but not broken, Bamba sailed back to England in June 1902 with rage 'burning with the fire of a white-hot sun.' At Faraday House she was demanding and difficult, and she spent her energy warning Sophia — who was enjoying British society and the suffrage movement — that the white establishment could never be trusted. Sophia found her tricky, but the sisters' bond held. Then Bamba hatched a plan that none of her handlers expected: she declared that regardless of whether the Secretary of State gave permission, the sisters were going to attend the 1902 Delhi Durbar. Nobody was surprised that such a 'fool plan' came from 'the really awkward sister.' But it worked. Bamba and Sophia went to India, Bamba stood in the Shalimar Gardens where her father had played as a boy, visited the Golden Temple in Amritsar, and made a decision: she was staying. She would live and die in Lahore, and anyone who objected could go to hell.

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.

The announcement arrived by telegram: 'I should now be addressed as Princess Bamba Sutherland.' Her family was baffled. Here was a woman who had spent decades railing against the white establishment, who had told Sophia she could never trust British people — and she had married one of them. Lieutenant Colonel David Waters Sutherland was Australian by birth, Scottish by heritage, son of a gold miner from Victoria, and the Honourable Surgeon to the Viceroy of India: Raj central casting. But the logic was clear when Anita unpicks it. ^{[1] — Anita Arundhati "Married 1915 — 20 years older husband: In 1915, Princess Bamba secretly married Lieutenant Colonel David Waters Sutherland, an Australian-b…" 23:54 Play} Bamba could not access her father's money or her family stipend without marrying. The British government had placed a £10,000 dowry provision for both Catherine and Bamba — inserted, Anita suspects with some dark amusement, because officials assumed women so difficult and unconventional would never actually find husbands. Bamba proved them wrong. Being the widow of a British colonial doctor also conferred legal residency in Lahore and, crucially, an identity she could deploy if threatened. He died in Scotland in 1939. She was in Lahore. They never had children.

William raises what he suspects: had Bamba converted to Sikhism? Anita's answer is firm and clarifying. Every one of the Duleep Singh sisters — Bamba included — was baptised Christian, remained Christian throughout their lives, and received Christian funerals. They were aware of the Guru Granth Sahib but would never have described themselves as Sikhs. This complicates the popular narrative, which routinely calls them 'Sikh princesses' while also quietly deleting their German and Ethiopian heritage. Then Anita pivots to something quietly beautiful: in 1924, 61 years after Maharani Jindan's death, Bamba personally arranged for her grandmother's ashes to be moved from Nasik — where the British had confined them — to a ghat on the Godavari River. She and Sophia made the journey together, said prayers with a Sikh priest in attendance, and scattered the ashes in the sacred river. The attachment to her family's story was absolute and lifelong. This was not ideology; it was love.

The 1930s and 1940s dealt Bamba blow after blow from a distance. Her husband died in Scotland in 1939 while she was in Lahore — they had been living parallel lives; she was 70 and trapped by the war. In 1942, word reached her that Catherine had died in England, found by Sophia on the floor; Bamba could not attend the funeral. Then came 1947 and the greatest catastrophe: Partition. In an upheaval that killed approximately 1.5 million people, Lahore — the Jewel of the North, a mixed city of Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims — was assigned to Pakistan. The Sikh population fled en masse. Bamba, bearing the conspicuously Sikh name Duleep Singh, with her grandfather's legacy written into every stone of the city, stayed. She was saved, as far as anyone knows, by Piyaji — her Muslim companion and de facto secretary, one of the most respected Muslims in Lahore, who vouched for her. Her British widow's identity gave her an additional layer of cover: she could be 'Mrs. Sutherland' if the situation demanded it. She refused to acknowledge that anything had changed.

When Sophia died in August 1948, she had asked in her will for her ashes to be returned to India. The task fell to Bamba — aged 80, alone in Lahore, the last of the line. Rather than fly, she travelled by sea and over land, explaining with characteristic precision that her sister had always been frightened of flying. Sophia was already dead. The ashes were scattered somewhere secret in Lahore; the location is not known. Bamba then lived another eight years, mostly in Piyaji's company, sight failing, health failing, still calling herself the Queen of the Punjab and the last true sovereign of the Sikhs. ^{[1] — Anita Arundhati "Not one of Maharaja Duleep Singh's five children — Sophia, Catherine, Victor, Freddie, or Bamba — produced a single heir. In her final year…" 40:00 Play} In her twilight, she began circulating a darker story: that when the sisters were children at Elveden, nannies had been putting mystery powders in their food to make them sterile. Not one of Duleep Singh's five children — Sophia, Catherine, Victor, Freddie, or Bamba — had a single child. Anita's reading is that this was not paranoid conspiracy theory but an articulation of grief: the dynasty was over, it ended with her, and she needed to make sense of the enormity of that.

In 1957, with Pakistan already going wrong and Piyaji her last real link to the outside world, Bamba died of a heart attack aged 87. The city she had chosen was Sikh-free: there was no one left to say the final prayers. The funeral was arranged by the British Deputy High Commission — the institution representing the very empire she had spent her life opposing. She would have been appalled. She was buried at Lahore's Christian cemetery on Jail Road under a Christian cross, as she had lived: a Christian, whatever anyone else wanted her to be. ^{[1] — William Dalrymple "When Bamba died in 1957 at 87, there were no Sikhs left in Lahore to pray for her. The funeral was arranged by the British Deputy High Comm…" 42:30 Play} On her tombstone, translated for the Pakistani Dawn newspaper: a Persian couplet from the 13th-century poet Saadi — 'The difference between royalty and civility vanishes when the bones are dug up.' Her entire collection of Sikh-era paintings, watercolours, miniatures, and manuscripts passed to Piyaji, and is now on display in the Bamba Museum inside Lahore Fort — five minutes' walk from the house she had bought to reclaim her grandfather's kingdom. Her house is long demolished, her roses gone, almost every physical trace of her erased. Anita closes by teasing the fourth episode: the two daughters Bamba tried to erase — Princess Pauline and Princess Irene, born of Ada Wetherall, the chambermaid — one dying in an unmarked French grave, the other walking into the sea at Monte Carlo aged 26, leaving a note reading 'I am homeless.'