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London exhibition to celebrate legacy of Maharaja Duleep Singh’s daughters
The exhibition coincides with the launch of British Indian historian, author and art collector Peter Bance’s new book “The Last Royals of Lahore: The Duleep Singhs”
British Indian historian, author and art collector Peter Bance has loaned a major chunk of his extensive Maharaja Duleep Singh collection for a new royal exhibition to shine the spotlight on the last Sikh ruler’s daughters.
Bance, whose original name is Bhupinder Singh Bance, comes from a Punjabi family with roots in Daska in Sialkot district, now in Pakistan. His family moved to the United Kingdom in the 1930s, when his grandfather immigrated to England in 1936.
The exhibition, “The Last Princesses of Punjab”, which will open at Kensington Palace in London on March 25, will revolve around Princess Sophia Duleep Singh and her extraordinary life as an activist for women’s voting rights as a suffragette in 20th century England.
Her fellow British Indian princess sisters, her German mother, Bamba Muller, grandmother Maharani Jind Kaur and godmother Queen Victoria, as great influences in her life, will be among those showcased to mark Sophia’s 150th birth anniversary this year.
“Princess Sophia Duleep Singh is best known as a suffragette who fought for women’s right to vote, using her position to further the cause,” said Historic Royal Palaces, the charity that cares for England’s palaces.
“Along with her sisters Catherine and Bamba, Sophia inherited a rich but complex heritage from both sides of her family. The women expressed and connected to this in different ways,” it said, with reference to the exhibition.
The exhibition coincides with the launch of Bance’s new book “The Last Royals of Lahore: The Duleep Singhs”, a voluminous coffee-table tome packed with newly discovered archival material and exclusive firsthand accounts from those who knew this British Punjabi royal family intimately.
“This is my third instalment on the Duleep Singh family, published to coincide with the exhibition at Kensington Palace and just as that focuses on the females, the emphasis of the book is also on the females of the royal durbar,” said Bance.
“The book has a chapter on each member of the family of the last Sikh Maharaja of Punjab, covering his five daughters and three sons,” he said.
The book opens with a foreword by singer-actor Satinder Sartaj, with whom he had collaborated for the 2017 film on Duleep Singh’s life story “The Black Prince”.
Fascinating aspects of the family are revealed for the first time, including Catherine’s role as a saviour of dozens of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, earning her a reference as the “Punjabi Schindler”.
Bance’s new book also delves into the lesser-known facts around Prince Victor Duleep Singh’s association with the Ghadar Party and Indian revolutionaries in Germany during the First World War. The other son of Duleep Singh, Prince Frederick, by contrast lived the life of an English squire, dedicated to saving churches and heritage buildings from closure.
“Everything in the book is from actual documents from archives or directly from Duleep Singh’s personal papers which I obtained,” the author said.
“While I have written in depth about his life in my previous books, it is Maharaja Duleep Singh’s life in England which I have really elaborated on in this book, especially at Elveden (East Anglia region of England) and in Scotland, where he had a number of estates,” he said.
“It covers his sporting life, his personal issues and financial difficulties...everything from official documents, so there’s no hearsay or myths,” he confirmed.
Duleep Singh, the son and heir of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the 19th century founder of the Sikh Empire, was famously exiled to England as a teenager in 1854.
After the deaths of his father and brother, Duleep Singh became ruler of the kingdom at the age of five but was removed from the throne after Britain annexed Punjab in 1849. At the age of 15, Duleep Singh arrived in England and later made his home at Elveden Hall in Suffolk. His family remained in the area for the next century.
Bance has worked tirelessly collating and documenting his history ever since a chance visit to Duleep Singh’s grave at a churchyard in Elveden as a young student.
“I think, for the Indian diaspora, we can relate to this family because this was one of the first Punjabi/Indian families of mixed race... and they kept to their Punjabi roots. Very religious churchgoing Christians, they never forgot their roots and made immense contributions to life in the UK, just as the Indian community continues to make to this day,” he said.
His historic collection on Duleep Singh has been on permanent display at a museum in Thetford, Norfolk, for a few years now. This weekend, the collection marks a major new milestone when it is unveiled as part of a new permanent Duleep Singh Gallery at the museum.
The items on display at Kensington Palace are expected to travel to Canada for an exhibition after the UK run ends in November.
