Speaker
William Dalrymple
Appearances over time
5 episodes
Episodes
5
375. Algerian Revolution: The French Invasion (Ep 1)
372. The First British Indians: The Sisters Rejected By Queen Victoria (Ep 4)
371. The First British Indians: Last Sikh In Lahore (Ep 3)
370. The First British Indians: Saving Jews In Nazi Germany (Ep 2)
369. The First British Indians: The Suffragette Princess (Ep 1)
Podcasts
Quotes & moments
Somerville College Oxford, where Catherine and Bamba studied, was founded in 1879; women could sit exams but were not formally awarded degrees until 1920.
At its height, the Sikh Empire controlled the Punjab, Kashmir, the Himalayas and stretched to the borders of China and the Wakhan Corridor.
In the era of the Barbary corsairs, roughly a third of Algiers' population consisted of enslaved Europeans captured from across the Mediterranean and beyond.
William noted that approximately 1.5 million people were killed in the violence surrounding the 1947 Partition of India, the upheaval in which Bamba was stranded in Lahore.
Abd el-Kader built a proper army of 8,000 infantry, 2,000 cavalry, and 240 artillerymen with 20 cannons within a few years of beginning his resistance.
The Treaty of Tafna in 1837 granted Abd el-Kader sovereignty over two-thirds of Algeria, an extraordinary concession by France.
Sophia immediately joined the Women's Tax Resistance League, founded in 1909, refusing to pay taxes on her servants, dog licences, and carriage licences.
Princess Bamba died of a heart attack in Lahore in 1957 aged 87; her funeral was arranged by the British High Commission and there were no Sikhs present at the ceremony.
During the 1860 Damascus sectarian violence, Abd el-Kader sheltered 12,000 Christians — including French missionaries — in his home, earning honours from Napoleon III and Abraham Lincoln.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, described as one of the torturers involved in French anti-resistance activities in Algeria, later led the political party formed by repatriated pieds-noirs settlers in France.
Catherine's final wish was for a quarter of her ashes to be buried as near as possible to Lena Schäfer's coffin in Kassel, eventually fulfilled by her sister Bamba.
The British establishment would overlook brown skin if it came with a title. Maharajas got into clubs and courts; Ada and her daughters got nothing. Pauline and Irene suffered not just racial prejudice but the added burden of their mother's low class.
Pauline and Irene Duleep Singh were the daughters of Maharaja Duleep Singh and his second wife Ada Wetherall, a working-class woman Queen Victoria despised. Their working-class names alone — Beryl, Irene — told the whole story: these girls were never going to be admitted to court.
Maharaja Duleep Singh spent a year in a run-down Moscow boarding house waiting in vain for Tsar Alexander III to champion his cause. That Boxing Day, Ada gave birth to Pauline there. The name Alexandrina — a hedge, perhaps for the Tsar, perhaps for Victoria — said everything about a man who had run out of options.
Irene Duleep Singh began having epileptic fits by 1915 and spent time in nursing homes being treated for 'neurasthenia' — the Victorian catch-all for depression and anxiety — including electroshock therapy. Her husband eventually left her. She moved back to Paris, the city of her worst memories, and started breaking apart.
Irene changed her will on the morning she died, cutting out her sister Pauline and leaving everything to Dr. Barnardo's Homes for Poor and Unwanted Children. It was a final, silent accusation: I was unloved. I was unwanted too.
Ada Duleep Singh was dismissed as a chambermaid or worse, but she nursed soldiers at Verdun, ran up £17,000 of debts at Monte Carlo, then marched into the India Office and demanded a small house and a hat shop in exchange for never bothering them again. They gave it to her.
For decades, no one knew what happened to Pauline after she vanished following the will case. Historian Peter Bunce traced her through a distant relative's family tree to a French death certificate: she died of TB on 10 April 1941, at a sanatorium above the Pyrenees, buried by authorities alone, like her father before her.
Not one of Maharaja Duleep Singh's children — across both families — had children of their own. The Lion of Punjab's bloodline simply stopped. Sophia had purpose; Catherine had love and mission; Pauline and Irene simply evaporated.
When Irene's will left everything to Dr. Barnardo's, Pauline contested it, claiming Irene was not of sound mind. Then Bamba intervened — hiring feared KC Sir Ellis Hume-Williams, who tore Irene's reputation apart with racist slurs and revelations of self-harm. Bamba lost, paid all costs, and never spoke to Pauline again.
On 8 October 1926, Irene left two notes before walking into the sea near Monte Carlo. Her letter to her lawyer ended with the phrase 'I am homeless' — despite having an estate of £30,000. The final Princess of Punjab had nowhere she belonged.
Frederick Duleep Singh, the antiquarian Norfolk bachelor who collected Jacobite art, was the one member of the first family who opened his home unconditionally to Pauline and Irene. He sent Ada money anonymously. When he died in 1926, the last restraint on Bamba's hostility disappeared.
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.
Pauline Duleep Singh appeared on the cover of Country Life in 1911, styled as 'Princess Pauline' in a ball gown. But for those who knew her background, it was a sniggering title — the beautiful daughter of a disgraced Maharaja and a suspected brothel worker, being dressed up as respectable.
Analysis
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