OPINION:
SOPHIA: PRINCESS, SUFFRAGETTE, REVOLUTIONARY
By Anita Anand
Bloomsbury, $30, 416 pages
Some people deserve to be remembered not because of any towering achievement, but simply because they did their best, sometimes rather clumsily, to make a positive contribution. Sophia Duleep Singh, daughter of the last maharajah of the Punjab, was such a person and Anita Anand’s groundbreaking biography, thoroughly researched and written with considerable verve, does her subject full justice — and then some. In her effort to bring alive a heroine who had hitherto existed only as a minor footnote, Ms. Anand occasionally inflates Sophia’s part in the events around her. There are moments when readers are left with the impression that they are dealing with a female version of Woody Allen’s “Zelig” or Tom Hanks’ “Forrest Gump,” someone who morphs in and out of great events without ever being a real part of them.
This is unfortunate because, while her impact on her times was limited, Sophia was “the little princess who could,” a religiously, culturally and politically conflicted person by virtue of her birth who never stopped trying to make something of her life by serving others. She did so in different ways at different times — wartime nursing volunteer, society suffragette, pioneer “community organizer” for downtrodden Indian “Lascars” (underpaid, mistreated Indian merchant seamen), and as a voice of sanity in a dysfunctional family torn between ancestral roots and royal pretensions in Northern India and the desire to shine in English high society.
Sophia’s story really begins with her grandfather, Maharajah Ranjit Singh, although he may have been her grandfather in name only. A skilled Sikh military adventurer, Ranjit Singh filled the power vacuum left by the collapse of the Muslim-dominated Mogul Empire, carving out a vast, Sikh-dominated kingdom for himself in the Punjab, the fertile North Indian region that still serves as granary to the Subcontinent. In Ms. Anand’s telling, Ranjit Singh is right up there with Alexander the Great and Napoleon, presiding over an enlightened empire in which Muslims and Hindus served side by side with the dominant Sikhs in a golden age that only ended with his death in 1839.
So much for the sanitized version. While the Sikh religion did preach and practice a higher level of tolerance than either Hinduism or Islam, Ranjit Singh’s empire was an overextended, improvised conquest that grew less and less governable as it expanded away from its ethnic core. In this respect at least, it resembled the empire of Alexander the Great, albeit in microcosm. And, like Alexander’s empire, it did not survive its founder, falling prey to rival warlords on the one hand and on the other, the growing British influence as the East India Company extended its presence ever-further north.
Sophia’s father, Duleep Singh, in the words of a modern biography, was born “at a time [1838, a year before Ranjit Singh’s death] when the great man [Ranjit Singh] was unlikely to have been able to father a child for, apart from a preference for the company of beautiful boys, he had had two strokes and was partially paralyzed; in addition, an indulgence in laudanum, brandy fortified with powdered pearls, and fat quails stuffed with spices, had wrought havoc with his liver.”
By 1849 young Duleep Singh was a king without a kingdom. Given English guardians and a Victorian education, he voluntarily converted to Christianity and settled in England where he was virtually adopted by Queen Victoria and petted by society. Unfortunately, the handsome, exotic figure he cut as a youth soon degenerated; by the time he had fathered Sophia he was a balding, overweight spendthrift who neglected his family and eventually ran away with one of the servant girls. Sophia, however, remained a goddaughter of Queen Victoria and had a society debut. She never married but plunged into the politics of her times as an avid proto-feminist. One of her great regrets was that, because of her protected status as foreign royalty, she could never get the authorities to arrest her. She did, however, help to spread the crusade for women’s rights to her native India, even though she was only half-Indian herself; her mother was the illegitimate offspring of a German merchant named Muller and an Abyssinian slave whom her father had acquired from English missionaries in Egypt.
Princess Sophia outlasted Queen Victoria and the Raj. She lived to see British women get the vote, survived the Blitz and witnessed yet another partitioning of the Punjab, this time between India and Pakistan. In the end, her only real friends were her devoted — and thoroughly British — housekeeper and an unruly pack of dogs. While she never quite became a crazy cat lady, one less-than-adoring member of the hired help referred to her as “a bad-tempered old bat.” Bad-tempered or not, her steely resolve and the conviction that, whatever the truth about her family origins, she was to the manor born, had left her proud, unbent and confident that her life had not been wasted on idle trifles.
• Aram Bakshian Jr., a former aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, has written widely on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.
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