The episode opens with William Dalrymple delivering a heartfelt endorsement of the London Review of Books, describing it as 'the most wonderful journal in the country' and directing listeners to lrb.me/trial for a three-month free trial. This is followed by a separately produced BetterHelp ad citing the company's 2026 State of Stigma report — which found that 74% of Americans believe society still discourages asking for help — and a pharmaceutical ad for Tremfya. These sponsor segments set up the episode proper and allow ad-free Club members to skip straight to content.

Anita Anand and William Dalrymple welcome listeners to a new mini-series tracing the extraordinary lives of five sisters — Sophia, Catherine, Bamba, Irene, and Pauline — daughters of the last ruler of the Sikh Empire. Dalrymple hands the reins to Anand, noting that she is not merely telling someone else's story but resurrecting a woman she personally made famous through her 2015 biography. Anand briefly sketches the series arc: suffragettes, mixed-race Edwardian life, lesbian relationships in Nazi Germany, and colonial resistance. She plugs the Empire Club for ad-free access to the complete series, establishing both the emotional and commercial stakes before diving in.

William Dalrymple praises Anita Anand's biography of Sophia Duleep Singh, calling it a story she 'discovered' and 'made famous', rescuing a woman totally forgotten by history. Anand reflects with evident pride on the 2015 publication, recalling how strange and far-fetched the concept of an 'Indian suffragette' seemed to people at the time — some asking whether she had written a novel. She describes how radically the cultural landscape has shifted since: Sophia now has a Royal Mail postage stamp, a blue plaque (which Anand accidentally pulled down on her own head at the unveiling), and a current exhibition at Kensington Palace Gardens dedicated to her and her sisters. This section establishes Anand's personal investment in the story and contextualises why a deep podcast dive is warranted.

William Dalrymple provides the historical backdrop: the Sikh Empire at its zenith controlled not only the Indian and Pakistani Punjab but Kashmir, the Himalayas, and territory stretching to the borders of China and the Wakhan Corridor — 'an enormous chunk of territory' that the British East India Company dared not challenge. Anita Anand introduces Sophia's grandfather Maharaja Ranjit Singh, known as Sher-e-Punjab, the Lion of Punjab. Dalrymple notes the divided memory of his reign: in India he is celebrated as a tolerant, enlightened ruler who freed the Sikhs from Marathas, Afghans, and Mughals; in Pakistan he is remembered for the brutality of his ex-Napoleonic generals hanging people from the gates of Peshawar. Anand adds the famous anecdote of Ranjit Singh's reply about his sightless eye — that God had given him one eye so he could look upon all religions equally — and notes his most famous possession: the Koh-i-Noor diamond on his arm.

Anita Anand picks up the story after Ranjit Singh's death, describing the violent succession chaos within the Sikh royal family that ultimately left a young child, Duleep Singh, as the final ruler. Dalrymple and Anand point listeners to the show's earlier Koh-i-Noor episodes for granular detail, but sketch the essential tragedy: the East India Company — 'this corporation' — conquered the Sikh Empire and deposed Duleep Singh. Dalrymple describes Duleep as 'this beautiful adolescent that Queen Victoria falls in love with', famously painted by Winterhalter in what he calls 'one of the greatest, if not the greatest portrait to come from the Raj.' The scene is set for the heartbreak that follows.

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.

Dalrymple sketches the six surviving Duleep Singh children as they appear in the family's famous photographs: Victor (eldest, destined for Sandhurst), Frederick (Cambridge-bound antiquarian who will ban electricity from his Norfolk home and hang Oliver Cromwell's portrait upside down in his toilet), Albert Edward 'Eddie', and the three sisters Bamba, Catherine, and Sophia. Anand notes that the women are 'much more interesting than the men, as so often the case', and that the household is increasingly unstable — Bamba Müller, lonely and abandoned by her philandering husband, is beginning to drink heavily. The family splits time between Belgravia and the grand Elveden estate, but the comfortable façade is already cracking.

Anita Anand introduces Sophia's birth on 8 August 1876, during a heatwave, as the most photographed of Duleep's children. She is chosen as Queen Victoria's goddaughter, her middle name Alexandrovna a deliberate echo of the Queen's birth name Alexandrina — Duleep's way of cementing the connection while putting his own 'twist' on it. Victoria, despite the Sikh family's private nickname for her — 'Mrs. Fagin, the receiver of stolen goods' — genuinely warms to Sophia, and the episode notes she is the only daughter whom Victoria actually loves. On paper it looks like a charmed life: a grace-and-favour future in the heart of the British establishment. But Anand's ominous tone signals that this apparent security is about to collapse.

Duleep Singh's simmering bitterness boils over in 1886: he declares his intention to return to India, reconvert to Sikhism, and foment a revolution backed by the Tsar. The British intercept him at Aden, the controlled port on the Red Sea — all voyages through the Suez Canal passed through it. His family, including nine-year-old Sophia, is arrested with him. Anand marks this grimly as 'Sophia's first arrest, and it will be the first of many.' Rather than staying to fight, Duleep abandons his already-depressed wife and six children, sending them back to England penniless while he escapes to Paris to rendezvous with Ada Weatherall, a chambermaid from Kennington he met at a hotel that Dalrymple dryly describes as 'basically a bordello'. Anand's voice carries evident contempt: 'I despise what he does at this point.'

Bamba Müller, publicly humiliated by press coverage of her 'traitor' husband and abandoned in England, takes to drink as her only solace. Sophia catches typhoid, and Bamba — described as pulling herself out of the bottle long enough to be distraught — nurses her on her knees. The typhoid passes from Sophia to her mother. The morning Sophia's fever breaks, the first thing she sees is her mother dead on the floor beside her bed. Anand describes the image with devastating clarity: 'She sort of never forgave herself for that.' Six years later, the beloved little brother Eddie — whom Sophia had effectively raised as a mother after Bamba's death — wins a place at Eton only to develop pneumonia and die, with Sophia and her sisters at his bedside as he slips in and out of consciousness calling for his parents. The graves at Elveden churchyard still receive pilgrim flowers and candles.

With Victor at Sandhurst, Freddie quietly antiquing in Cambridge, and the three sisters effectively parentless, Queen Victoria provides the safety net. She places the children under the guardianship of Arthur Oliphant and gives Sophia — her favourite — Faraday House, a grace-and-favour property directly opposite the front gates of Hampton Court Palace, with an annual allowance of £200. The same Crown Estate housed war widows, heroes, and royal favourites. Meanwhile, Duleep dies broken and broke in a Parisian hotel, never having made it back to Punjab. Victoria's warmth, however, is strictly selective: she kisses Sophia at her Buckingham Palace debut — an unusual mark of high favour — while keeping spies on her sisters and openly despising them for what she regards as their disloyal, 'wild and feral' attitudes. Sophia, described by the Church Times as 'a thoroughly English gal notwithstanding her Oriental name', breeds prize Pomeranians, rides early bicycles, and wins at Crufts. She is the Establishment's acceptable face of Indian royalty.

The mid-episode break opens with Michael and Hannah from Goalhanger's Rest Is Science series delivering a Cancer Research UK-sponsored explainer on CAR-T cell immunotherapy, describing how T cells can be reprogrammed to identify and destroy cancer cells, and noting that Cancer Research UK-funded scientists are extending this approach to solid tumours. A separate pharmaceutical awareness ad for Peyronie's disease rounds out the break before the episode resumes at the Delhi Durbar.

The year 1902 marks the pivot of Sophia's life. The Delhi Durbar — a spectacular celebration of Edward VII's coronation (which Edward himself declined to attend) — is the social event of the Anglo-Indian world, and every one of Sophia's circle is going. But the sisters have no invitation and scheme to attend anyway, booking different ships to avoid detection. What should be a triumphant homecoming — returning to the homeland where their father was Maharaja — is instead a humiliation: British officials treat them with contempt, exclude them from main ceremonies, and shun them entirely. Anand draws the parallel to Gandhi's experience: Indians who flourish in England become colonial subjects the moment they step back on Indian soil. Lahore's streets are named for Victoria; there are statues of the Queen everywhere; no road acknowledges the Sikh rulers. Yet everywhere Sophia travels in Punjab, Sikhs prostrate themselves at her feet calling her 'the lion's cub' and pledging to fight for her. The contrast between colonial erasure and popular Sikh reverence turns her mind completely.

Amid the emotional turmoil of the Delhi Durbar, Sophia is introduced to Lala Lajpat Rai — not a famous name in Britain but a leading figure of early Indian nationalism, closely associated with what would become the Indian National Congress. Rai treats Sophia with a warmth and respect she has never known from a father figure, showing her what her people are actually experiencing under British rule. Anand describes Rai 'like a father to her, like the father she really didn't have in her own father.' When Rai is later caught in a lathi charge — the colonial police's brutal method of beating protesters with long wooden sticks — and killed, Sophia writes in her diary with open hatred of the British for the first time. She returns to England a woman transformed, abandoning her socialite existence to fundraise for lascars and abandoned ayahs — and eventually to hear the suffragette cry that echoes the political demand she heard in India.

Back in England, Sophia begins acting for others rather than herself. She starts fundraising for lascars — Indian sailors abandoned in British ports without pay — and ayahs left destitute after their employers no longer need them. Then she hears the suffragette cry and recognises it immediately. Anand explains how Sophia connects the 'avasto, avasto' of Indian resistance to the suffragette 'give us a voice, give us a voice.' She joins fully: donating money, selling the suffragette newspaper outside Hampton Court Palace's front gates (drawing Daily Mail outrage), and driving press carriages loaded with 'Votes for Women' badges through London to park outside theatres and provoke drunken music-hall crowds into fights. King George V, embarrassed, writes to his private secretary asking if there is 'any way of removing this tiresome princess' — and is told bluntly by the India Office that evicting Queen Victoria's goddaughter would send 'a rather dangerous message to India', where things are already restive.

The climax of the episode arrives with Black Friday. The government has repeatedly dragged its feet on the Conciliation Bill, which would extend the vote to some women. On 18 November 1910, Asquith announces the bill will not have time to pass — effectively guillotining it. Emmeline Pankhurst has anticipated this: 300 of her most committed suffragettes are assembled at Caxton Hall, and they plan to march to Parliament in groups of 12 to circumvent Churchill's new law banning gatherings larger than that number. Sophia marches shoulder to shoulder with Pankhurst. At St Stephen's Gate they are kettled by police. Churchill's order for the day — 'don't arrest the women, discourage them' — is a deliberate choice not to let suffragettes occupy courtrooms and make speeches. What follows is six hours of police violence: women picked up and thrown against pavements, their breasts punched, kicked between the legs, thrown into crowds of men. Some police officers have covered their badge numbers. MPs hang out of Parliamentary windows to watch. Anand's account does not soften any of it.

Despite being barely five feet tall, Sophia does not watch passively. She sees one police officer repeatedly smashing a woman against the concrete — picking her up and dashing her down again each time she staggers to her feet. Judging that the third blow will kill her, Sophia rushes in and body-checks the officer away. Anand compares the shock value to seeing Zendaya suddenly appear in a riot. Rather than retreating, Sophia demands the officer's badge number, following him through the crowd as she is 'tossed around like a rag doll', repeating the number V700 until she has it memorised. After six hours the women are arrested — Sophia among them, as Anand has seen the arrest record — though none are charged, since Churchill cannot allow them to make their speeches in open court. Sophia's subsequent complaints escalate relentlessly: past the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, past the Home Secretary's office, until Churchill himself scrawls on a note, 'Send no more reply to her. W.S.C.' Anand describes seeing the document, pen indentations of anger visible in the paper.

Sophia's activism extends beyond the streets: in 1909 she joins the Women's Tax Resistance League and immediately stops paying taxes on her servants, her Pomeranian dogs' licences, and her carriage. She tears up tax demand notices and writes to the tax office invoking 'no taxation without representation.' When bailiffs arrive at Faraday House, force their way past the housekeeper, and seize her jewellery, the suffragettes turn it into theatre. They pack every seat at the Ashford auction, sit on male bidders or growl in their ears, and have celebrated Victorian artist and friend of Oscar Wilde, Louise Jopling-Roe, buy Sophia's ring and carry it back across the room to her in front of a cheering crowd of suffragettes unfurling their banners. Sophia also refuses to sign census papers, scrawling 'As women do not count, I refuse to be counted.' The bombing campaign of the wider suffragette movement is escalating dangerously — until the First World War ends it all.

When the First World War breaks out, Sophia and the suffragettes suspend their campaign and turn to the war effort. Sophia's role is characteristically personal: she travels to Brighton Pavilion — the domed Indian-looking royal pleasure palace repurposed as a hospital — to nurse broken Indian soldiers returning from the Western Front trenches. Dalrymple notes this reveals 'a quieter and more gentle and loving side of Sophia.' In 1918, the Representation of the People Act extends the franchise to women over 30 with a property qualification — Anand calls it 'a breaking of a dam', while noting full equality only arrived in 1928. Sophia's name appears on the suffragette statue in Parliament Square, a recent addition acknowledging what the movement owed to women like her.

Sophia lives long enough to watch India ripped apart by partition in 1947 — her father's kingdom torn asunder. She takes in Jewish and other refugees during the Second World War, and Anand mentions she met two of those refugees herself. She dies on 22 August 1948, aged 72, having spanned the world from Ranjit Singh's court to the atomic age. Her funeral instructions are precise and revealing: a full Wagner funeral march, a Christian service, cremation, and her ashes returned to India — carried by her sister Bamba. In her will, bridging the communal hatred of partition, she divides her estate between a Hindu, a Muslim, and a Sikh girls' school. Her Who's Who entry, where most people wrote paragraphs of self-promotion, contained a single line under interests: 'The advancement of women.' Anand closes by previewing the next episode — the equally extraordinary story of Princess Catherine Hilda Duleep Singh, who lived in Nazi Germany and is described as 'an Indian Schindler'.