This is history that doesn’t need dramatising. It already surpasses fiction.
How do you befriend the very Crown that exiled your family?
Born to Maharaja Duleep Singh, the same ruler who, as a child, was made to sign away the Koh-i-Noor, raised in Britain, and moving within the inner circles of the empire that stripped their family of everything the Duleep Singh princesses lived between worlds.
Indian heritage. Mixed lineage. Royal blood.
And yet, at a time in Britain when women couldn’t vote, Sophia, Catherine and Bamba found their voice and used it to fight for the right of every British woman to be counted and heard.
In this episode of India: A Story in the Making, I go inside Kensington Palace’s stunning exhibition The Last Princesses of Punjab, exploring lives that span suffragette activism, exile, empire, identity, and an extraordinary search for belonging.
And behind these three women? An equally remarkable lineage. Their mother, Bamba Müller, of Ethiopian and German heritage, raised Christian. And their grandmother, Maharani Jind Kaur, imprisoned by the British, who escaped in disguise and crossed mountains just to hold her son again.
These princesses lived through the most seismic chapters of modern history, India’s freedom struggle, the suffragette movement, two World Wars, and more. Their story is inseparable from the story of the age itself.
They though, were never just witnesses to history, they were inside it, shaping it, surviving it.
Fascinating falls far short of what they lived through. And what they did.
✨ A must-watch for connoisseurs of real-life stories that inspire.
📍 The Last Princesses of Punjab exhibition at Kensington Palace runs until 8 November 2026 ( https://www.hrp.org.uk/kensington-palace/whats-on/the-last-princesses-of-punjab/ )
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