Speaker
Anita Arundhati
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Princess Bamba Duleep Singh's life spanned 87 years and three empires, from Victorian London to newly created Pakistan.
Reports sent to Queen Victoria described Princess Bamba as having the worst temper among the Duleep Singh children, observed from the age of three.
Bamba was among fewer than 1,000 medical students in the entire United States in 1901, and one of very few non-white women in American medicine.
In the summer of 1902, Northwestern University trustees ruled that women could not become doctors, stripping Bamba of her qualification after she completed her coursework.
The British government offered Catherine and Bamba a £10,000 dowry each if they married, which the hosts suggest was set partly because officials assumed the 'difficult' sisters would never wed.
In 1915, Princess Bamba secretly married Lieutenant Colonel David Waters Sutherland, an Australian-born Raj surgeon 20 years her senior, announcing it only by telegram.
After the ethnic cleansing of Partition, Princess Bamba became effectively the last Sikh resident of Lahore, kept safe by her Muslim companion Piyaji.
When Sophia Duleep Singh died in 1948, Bamba — then aged 80 — personally transported her sister's ashes to Lahore and scattered them at an unknown location.
Not a single one of Maharaja Duleep Singh's five children — Sophia, Catherine, Victor, Freddie, or Bamba — produced any offspring, ending the dynasty entirely.
In 1924, Princess Bamba personally arranged for her grandmother Maharani Jindan's ashes to be transferred to the Godavari River, 61 years after Jindan's death.
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson obtained her medical license in 1865 via the Society of Apothecaries' back door, after which the society changed its rules, illustrating how hard medicine was for women.
In 1924 — 61 years after Maharani Jindan's death — Princess Bamba personally arranged for her grandmother's ashes to be transferred from Nasik to the Godavari River in a Sikh ceremony. It was an act of deliberate, determined piety: honouring the woman the British had tried to expunge from Punjab's history.
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.
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 Commissioner — the very establishment she had spent her life fighting. She was buried under a Christian cross in a Pakistani cemetery with a Persian couplet from the poet Saadi on her stone.
Not one of Maharaja Duleep Singh's five children — Sophia, Catherine, Victor, Freddie, or Bamba — produced a single heir. In her final years, Bamba claimed the British had poisoned them into sterility as children. Whether conspiracy theory or grief, the result was the same: a royal dynasty wiped off the map within a generation.
Princess Bamba refused to accept what the British did to her father's kingdom. She followed his lead in calling Queen Victoria 'Mrs. Fagan — receiver of stolen goods,' and that fury burned in her for the rest of her life.
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 and among the very few non-white women in US medicine. She finished her coursework, then Northwestern's trustees declared 'women cannot grasp surgery' and revoked her qualification.
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.
When Partition struck in 1947, Lahore became Pakistan and its Sikh population fled en masse. Bamba — bearing the unmistakably Sikh name Duleep Singh — stayed put. Her Muslim secretary Piyaji vouched for her, and her British widow's identity gave her cover. She became the last Sikh in the city she considered home.
Bamba's collection of Sikh-era paintings, watercolours, miniatures, and manuscripts passed to her Muslim companion Piyaji on her death. They are now housed in the Bamba Museum inside Lahore Fort — the very fort she moved near at the start of her quest to reclaim her grandfather's kingdom.
When Sophia died in 1948 and asked in her will for her ashes to return to India, it was left to 80-year-old Bamba to fulfil the request. She chose to travel by sea and over land rather than fly — because, she explained, her sister had always been frightened of flying. Sophia was already dead.
When Princess Bamba arrived in San Francisco in 1900, reporters were waiting for a charming Indian royal. What they got was a small, dark, unsmiling woman who screamed at them to leave her dogs alone. She had a Great Dane and a Russian Wolfhound whose name she refused to divulge.
It was Bamba's idea to attend the 1902 Delhi Durbar without official permission — declaring she didn't care what the Secretary of State said. Standing in the Shalimar Gardens and visiting the Golden Temple, she decided she was never leaving India. The trip also radicalised her sister Sophia, who came back a political fighter.
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