114 unthemed book review Sophia: princess, suffragette, revolutionary Anita Anand, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2015, 416pp., ISBN: 978-1-4088-3547-0, £9.99 (Pbk)
A fashionable woman of royal birth, Sophia Duleep Singh could have fit perfectly within the aristocratic milieu of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain. She could have been content to enjoy the benevolence of a godmother who was none other than Queen Victoria, and the generous treatment granted by the British to the descendants of the Punjabi royalty whom they had disempowered and ultimately replaced, and to pass into the annals of history thanks to Sophia’s grandfather and mythical Sikh king, Ranjit Singh. Instead, Sophia’s family vicissitudes, temperament and political passion gifted her with anything but a quiet existence. It is precisely on such vicissitudes and passion that Anita Anand’s book is centred. Anand opens with a brief prologue depicting Sophia at a suffragette meeting held just before the 18 November 1910 street brawl known as Black Friday, before delving into and dedicating the first part of the book to Sophia’s childhood and family history, which spanned the years from 1876 to 1898. The second (and richest) part focusses on the next fifteen or so years of Sophia’s life, up to 1914— which Anand terms ‘the revolutionary years’, because they represent the apex of Sophia’s militancy. Finally, the fifty pages composing the book’s third part are dedicated to the last three decades of Sophia’s life. Skilfully sailing through a stormy portion of British and Indian history—spanning about a century from Sophia’s father’s infancy in the 1840s to Sophia’s death in 1948—the author regales her readership with the story of the Punjabi princess’ troubled emotional and lived experiences. A prematurely motherless girl, deserted by an irresponsible father who wasted his fortune on gambling and doomed love affairs, Sophia blossomed into a young independent woman. She travelled to India in the early 1900s and was converted to nationalism by some of the most prominent figures of Indian history—including Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Lala Lajpat Rai and Sarala Devi Chaudhurani—before dedicating her heart and enthusiastic militancy to the cause of women’s suffrage. As the story unfolds, Anand increasingly sharpens the contours of her subject’s personality, depicting Sophia as a nonconformist woman constantly struggling to infuse her life with meaning and a sense of belonging—a woman who, despite trying hard, never quite fit in. Considering ‘the advancement of women’ as her paramount interest, Sophia sought familial belonging particularly within the suffragist ranks. In her early thirties, seduced by the words of the suffragette Una Dugdale, she enthusiastically joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU)—the militant faction of the suffrage movement—which ‘became Sophia’s new family’ (p. 227). On account of her social position, young age, skin tone and generous donations, Sophia stood out amongst the suffragettes and was quickly admitted to the union’s inner circle. She made friends with, among others, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Elizabeth Garret Anderson and the
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WSPU leader Emmeline Pankhurst, and did not shy away from the union’s harshest moments. She participated in the 1910 Black Friday protest, during which the police brutally repressed and assaulted the suffragettes, and unlike many of her companions, Sophia never uttered a word against the organisation’s methods when the WSPU began to wage guerrilla campaigns. The suffragettes caused nationwide chaos in the early 1910s, but Sophia’s faith never wavered; she was proud to evade taxes and fines, to appear on stage with the most unpopular women in the country, to increase her donations, and to sell the WSPU paper The Suffragette—all the while oblivious of how her expensive furs and royal celebrity clashed with the sandwich board with pro-franchise slogans that she wore and with the slogans that she shouted, especially in Buckingham Palace’s opinion. Sophia would have been happy to court imprisonment like her companions, but this she never achieved, as British authorities carefully avoided arresting Queen Victoria’s prote´ge´e. The five chapters dedicated to Sophia’s militancy are arguably the book’s most vivid eighty pages. The wealth of available sources—ranging from suffrage journal articles to suffragette leaders’ correspondence, organisational papers, writings and private documents—makes this section particularly interesting, and the author also does her best to fill in the spaces of Sophia’s inner dimension. It is in these pages that the subject really comes into focus as a woman eager to do her part against an authoritarian and unjust government, as well as against the phantoms of her own loneliness and unsettledness. When war was declared and the WSPU ceased its activities because its leaders elected to take a patriotic line, Sophia turned to tending the wounded Indian soldiers sent to England for their convalescence. With her furs replaced by a Red Cross nurse’s uniform, she could feel useful again and forget about the depression haunting her when she was not busy enough. Yet, this did not last long; loneliness and depression became Sophia’s companions in her middle age and were appeased only by the presence of her sister and the evacuees she sheltered during World War II. Sophia died in 1948. Her body was cremated and her ashes were scattered in India—thus were the wishes of a woman who, despite residing in Britain all of her life, had never felt entirely at home there. Although Sophia and her vicissitudes naturally take centre stage in its narration, Anand’s book can also be read as a women’s group biography. This is indeed a story featuring a number of women, each in her own right important for the narration no less than for Sophia’s life itself. Sophia’s grandmother, Queen Jindan, is the first of such remarkable women whom the reader encounters. She refused to be burnt on her husband Ranjit Singh’s funeral pyre and worried the Raj with her ‘perilous passions’; imprisoned by the British, who feared her interference in their scheming in Punjab, she managed to escape and finally flee to Nepal, proud despite the loss of her kingdom and enraged for having been torn from her child Duleep. Other exceptional women within the family were Sophia’s sisters, Catherine and Bamba, whose correspondences serve as an essential source for the book. The former moved to Germany, where she happily lived with Lina, her former governess and lover. The latter attempted a medical career in the United States, before being forced to renounce her dream when the university authorities decided that women were unfit to become doctors and cancelled the courses she was attending; Bamba then moved to Lahore, where she associated with Indian nationalist leaders. Many other women beyond the family circle fill the pages of Sophia, their vicissitudes providing the wide historical context within which Anand situates her subject’s story: Queen Victoria; Emmeline Pankhurst and the other suffragettes; Sarojini Naidu, Lady Tata and the other members of the Women’s Indian Association, the first pan-Indian
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women’s organisation; Edith McCall Anderson and her caring army of nurses and volunteers; Sophia’s housekeeper Bosie and her daughter Drovna, whom Sophia loved dearly and who shared her memories of the princess with the author, providing her with valuable source material on Sophia’s last years. A work of history which reads like a novel, Anita Anand’s book is fascinating and compelling. It will interest all those wishing to learn about the most important moments of Indian and British history through the story of a remarkable woman who never sought glory and has escaped historiography, although in those key moments she took an active and uncompromising part.
Elena Borghi M.S. Merian - R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Metamorphoses of the Political (ICAS:MP) doi:10.1057/s41305-016-0017-8
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