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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Politics
Caroline Davies

Exhibition to tell story of Punjabi princess and pioneering suffragette Sophia Duleep Singh

Sophia, Catherine and Bamba Singh.
Sophia Duleep Singh (right) with her sisters, Catherine and Bamba, who also feature in the exhibition. Photograph: Unknown/© Peter Bance

The extraordinary life of an exiled Punjabi princess, embraced by the British royal court and a goddaughter of Queen Victoria, but who would become a pioneering suffragette and challenge the very authority of the elite social circles in which she moved, is to be told in a new exhibition.

Princess Sophia Duleep Singh was the daughter of Duleep Singh, the last Sikh maharajah of the Punjab. As a child he was forced to surrender his lands to the East India Company in 1849, and sign away the famous Koh-i-noor diamond, now a potent symbol of colonial exploitation and set in the crown of the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

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