An Article by Sohini Mukherjee
Sohini, aged two thousand as of 2019, completed her Masters in History from Delhi University and is currently an MPhil student of History Department at University of Hyderabad. She spends her days googling random information that has nothing whatsoever to do with her life, laughing at memes and cracking terrible jokes that infuriates people.
Duleep Singh and his formidable daughters
Maharaja Duleep Singh
Ranjit Singh’s death in 1839 brought about a whole lot of chaos to his erstwhile sprawling kingdom of Punjab and Kashmir. What followed was everyday family drama in the lives of royals, i.e.bad blood and violence between his various descendants as well as the Punjab chiefs, all of whom were vying for the control of the Lahore durbar before the kingdom promptly passed into the hands of the British colonial rulers. A young Maharaja Duleep Singh, who was 4 years old when his father died, was made to sign a treaty handing over his kingdom and the Kohinoor (major sad reacts) to the British,after which he was shipped off to England with John Login where he would become Queen Victoria’s favourite baby boy. .
He had a nice mansion in the Hampton Court, a generous pension courtesy of the Colonial government, and went on to marry Bamba Muller, the daughter of a German banker and an Abyssinian slave, whom he met in Cairo when she was student (talk about a meet cute!) But Duleep Singh could never really come to terms with what he had lost and how he was basically running in the same circles with the very people who had imprisoned his mother and had torn him away from his homeland when he was a kid (although he was reunited with his mother, Jinda Kaur in his later years). He spent his life drinking and having a bunch of mistresses while also trying to reclaim his lost kingdom and ultimately died alone in Paris. He had children with both Bamba Muller and his second wife Ada Wetherill. Sophia, Catherine and Bamba were his daughters with Muller.
These three princesses were incredible in their own ways. They had as their godmother Queen Victoria herself and they spend an idyllic life in England attending all the cool parties and graduating from Oxford. But then they all sailed to India during King Edward VII’s coronation in 1903 to attend the Imperial Durbar (basically a really big bash) arranged by Lord Curzon in Delhi. At first, Edward was like,‘Nuh uh! Not gonna go’, but then he was convinced to travel.
The Durbar was meant to let the Indian princes/rulers/chiefs know who the boss wasand that ended up being an eye-opener for the Duleep Singh princesses, because the British officials in Lahore were under orders not to treat them the same as they generally treated official diplomats. Mind you, they were the granddaughters of the ‘lion of the Punjab’ and obviously they had to be shown their place. Catherine and Sophia turned into suffragettes. Sophia was part of the Tax Resistance League and was even arrested for not paying taxes for the groomsmen she had employed and the carriages she used to keep. She walked into court and announced that she would only pay taxes when her voting rights as a citizen were acknowledged by the government.
The Duleep Singh’s Princesses
The Elveden Estate, Home of the Duleep Singhs
Catherine on the other hand moved to Germany with her governess Lina Scafer with whom she shared a super intimate bond, sources tell us. And she spent the rest ofher life in Germany with Lina. Bamba lived in India for a really long time. In 1905,she travelled to India with Marie Antoinette Gottessman who married Umrao Shergill and eventually gave birth to Amrita Shergill. If that does not blow your mind, nothing will. Bamba married David Waters Sutherland,the principal of the King Edward Medical College in Lahore. She was widowed in 1939.
None of the Duleep Singh princess had any kids. When she died in 1957, Ranjit Singh and his family had become distant fairytales and she lived her last years in perpetual anonimity. She had bequethed all of her possessions to her secretary Pir Karim Supra Baksh of Lahore who sold off all her expensive paintings after her death. Around 1997, an offshore Swiss bank account emerged which as it turned out belonged to Catherine and Lina (it was a dormant joint account!)and as expected a whole bunch of people claimingto be Ranjit’s Singh’s long lost descendents started turning up. The descendants of Baksh were literally not even aware of what was going on when the authorities ruled in their favour. So basically, they woke up one morning and found out that they were rich, because of a long dead royal princess. The moral of the story, folks, is to never lose hope!
