The Story of Sophia Duleep Singh and why the right to vote remains critical
As we mark the hundred years of the passage of the 19th amendment, in the United States, a Sikh Suffragette in the UK, Sophia Duleep Singh was born into a life of privilege, access and luxury. Her connection to Queen Victoria as her goddaughter guaranteed a life of relative comfort and frequent interactions with the British upper-classes. Yet, she understood the problem of not being able to vote in Great Britian and frequently joined British suffragettes in their marches, protests and advocacy to ensure that the right to vote was something that was open and accessible to all.
August 18th, 2020: Hundred Years of the Ratification of the 19th Amendment
As American women look back on the right to vote and the hundred years that women have voting, we try to take stock of our victories and the looming battle on the American electoral front when it comes to abolishing poll taxes, opening up and expanding access to critical vote by mail measures in the time of COVID-19 and the latest attempt by the Trump Administration to suppress the vote, I did a deep dive into Sophia Duleep Singh to find out what the struggle looked like for women across the world.
Background of Sophia Duleep Singh
Sophia Duleep Singh was the child of the last Maharajah of the Sikh Empire, Duleep Singh who was forced to abdicate his throne. He was born in what is now Lahore, Pakistan and was exiled at the age of 15. Queen Victoria tried her best to provide incentives to the newly exiled Royal and kept him around her in England to make sure he didn’t return to fight for his empire.
When Duleep Singh got to London, he converted to Christianity, got married to Bamba Muller and the daughters he had from his marriage to Bamba became socialites in the British upper-classes. This was to ensure that the daughters would get married off to someone in the upper-classes but also ensure that the British authorities could keep track of the Singh family.
Anita Anand a radio and television presenter, journalist, and author penned the book Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary to highlight the work of a upper-class woman who fought with ordinary women to fight for the right to vote. Anand notes that the Suffragette was made to be intentionally forgotten and disregarded in history books. Due to being the god daughter of the Queen, there were certain rules that came with attempting to hold Sophia accountable or punish her for the crime of protesting with other people. Anand writes that:
Sophia Duleep Singh was named after her father, Duleep Singh, the last maharajah of the Sikh Empire. The British had forced him to give up his rich kingdom in Northern India — and his famous diamond, the Koh-i-Noor — when he was just a child. Sophia grew up in England with Queen Victoria as her godmother.
“And then something changed,” Anand says. “Something changed, to turn her into this harridan witch-woman who was out on the streets, embarrassing the throne, embarrassing the government, throwing herself at the police, campaigning for women’s rights. Her plummet from grace was just like a falling asteroid.”
What changed? Sophia made a trip to India in 1903, to see the grand celebrations for the accession of King Edward VII as emperor of India. She was shocked by the deprivation and the brutality of life under British rule — and by the officials of the Raj, who treated her no better than any other brown face.
Anand further goes on to note about a particular incident in Sophia’s life that radicalized her into fighting on the streets and going toward a new social scene: the one that centered the agency and automony of women to partake in the political process. She writes:
What changed? Sophia made a trip to India in 1903, to see the grand celebrations for the accession of King Edward VII as emperor of India. She was shocked by the deprivation and the brutality of life under British rule — and by the officials of the Raj, who treated her no better than any other brown face.
“So she returns from India suddenly with this sense of fire in her, that it is not right to have equals treated as underclasses, be they brown or be they female,” Anand says. Sophia wanted a cause to fight for, and she found several: better treatment of Indian soldiers and her lifelong passion, women’s rights. She threw herself into the struggle — grappling with police at protests, throwing herself at the prime minister’s car and selling suffragette newspapers outside her apartment at Hampton Court Palace.
Due to the fact that she was she closely tied to Queen Victoria, publishing newspaper stories about the Queen’s Ward and her arrests would have made the British establishment look bad. The explanation for erasing Sophia Duleep Singh is simple. Anand says:
“She was really punished for standing up to the British establishment, and as a result, more or less deleted from history.”
In the growing movement in Britain to teach Imperial history and it’s contemporary affairs, Sophia Duleep Singh’s advocacy and fight for Indian and British women is crucial to understanding that not only white women were at the helm of social progress but also, the women of color who so often get tucked away or erased from their part in moving the needle.
In the Colonial Countryside article published by the BBC, showcases the National Trust Estates across Britian where powerful imperial figures and merchants resided and are highlighted as monuments to Britain's shameful past in it’s imperial designs and one in which there seems to be little reconciliation with the British Empire’s harm on the world. A lot of the objects, furnishings and collections point from shores very far from England that haven’t been returned to their lands, even as the overlords themselves have returned to their creator.
The article points to Wightwick Manor, near Wolverhampton, as a place where Sophia Duleep Singh frequently held high society events and what circumstances she lived in. I highlight this to show the ways in which the British empire not only sought to keep Singh entrapped in a gilded prison, but also sought to remind her that the British government could be on her case and take away these things from her as well.
Sophia Duleep Singh was also granddaughter to Maharaja Ranjit Singh and Maharani Jind Kaur. When she went back to visit India for the second time, she learned so much more about her family’s true power and lineage. She got radicalized by learning about how her family was cheated out of their empire and the destitution with which Indians were living under the British Raj. In the film The Black Prince, Maharajah Duleep Singh’s life is chronicled and one is a witness to deceit and treachery of the British in separating her family from their homeland.
In understanding the global struggle for the right to vote and to be counted as full citizens, who pay taxes, get counted in the census, and have the opportunity to run for public positions of power, we need to continue to highlight the struggles of Kaurs who are fighting for the right to vote and to be counted in the Census. Sophia Duleep Singh is one such figure.
Sophia Duleep Singh Fights For The Vote
In understanding Sophia Duleep Singh’s fight in the United Kingdom with determined British women in fighting for the right to vote, I virtually visited the UK National Archives to dive into the tactics used by protestors to gain the right to vote. One of them “No Vote, No Tax” reminds me of the same line used by American colonists when they sought to get representation in the British Parliament but were unable to do so. They campaigned on “No Taxation without Representation” and dumped British tea into the Boston Harbor.
In fact, the British suffragette movement influenced the fight for American women to gain the right to vote. As Jen Kirby writes for VOX:
Onstage at Madison Square Garden, Pankhurst explained why she and other British women activists had set aside peaceful methods of protest in favor of more confrontational action.
“Men got the vote because they were and would be violent. The women did not get it because they were constitutional and law-abiding,” she said. So, she explained, “the twentieth century women began to say to themselves, ‘Is it not time, since our methods have failed and the men’s have succeeded, that we should take a leaf out of their political book?’”
“I want to say here and now that the only justification for violence, the only justification for damage to property, the only justification for risk to the comfort of other human beings is the fact that you have tried all other available means and have failed to secure justice,” she continued. “I tell you that in Great Britain there is no other way.”
In the United States, the suffrage movement had ground on for nearly 70 years, focused on recruiting educated white women who lobbied and petitioned for suffrage, which at the turn of the last century was focused on winning women the vote state by state.
But a new crop of activists in the US felt the movement had stalled and gone stale. Though a handful of states, mostly out West, had enfranchised women, these suffragists began pushing a federal amendment to guarantee women the right to vote — and sought bolder, more attention-grabbing strategies, including a massive procession in Washington, DC, just that winter, to try to reinvigorate the campaign.
Kirby goes on to note that some of the American women who fought for the ratification of the 19th Amendment had also stood with British women as they fought for the right to vote. She writes:
Some of those prominent figures, including National Woman’s Party leaders Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, had fought and gotten arrested alongside British suffragettes. So when they wanted to shake things up in America, they looked to the British suffragettes, and the Pankhursts, for a potential playbook. And then they made it all their own.
“The American suffragists were never as radical as the Pankhursts and their followers in the Women’s Social and Political Union in Great Britain,” Jean H. Baker, a historian and professor emeritus at Goucher College, told me. “But nonetheless, there is a clear line of transmission from Great Britain to the United States.”
The fact that American women were less radical than the British women really is ironic given the history of the two countries, but nevertheless, the global movement for the right of to vote shared common threads and activists were able to build on that fight in their own ways.
The movement for American women to become enfranchised to vote took an American view when the question of racial enfranchisement came into view. White women were fighting for the right to vote, but would that extend to Black, Asian, Native American and Latina women? Kirby goes on to note that the price of getting the right to vote meant that black women would be left out of the struggle for 40 years.
Paul wanted to sustain this attention. She also believed strongly that the suffrage movement should pursue a federal amendment. The idea had always percolated, but the suffrage organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), had instead pursued a state-by-state strategy, in part to appease Southern states that feared the enfranchisement of Black women. (Paul and Burns eventually split from NAWSA in 1914, creating their own organization that would become the National Woman’s Party.)
But Paul also acquiesced to the South in her drive for a federal amendment, and the result was the sidelining of Black suffragists. Although the procession in DC was historic, the women visible were almost all white; Paul segregated the parade, forcing them to march in the end. Anti-lynching activist and suffragist Ida B. Wells-Barnett defied those orders, joining her state delegation along the route.
This strategy of having to appease southerners while having to draw back the rights of enfranchisement toward Black women is a common -and unfortunately racist- running theme in the United States. Progress has been stalled because other racial groups have come into the picture and have demanded the same rights as the ones being protested by others.
British Suffragettes Step Up
In the specific instance of Sophia Duleep Singh, she employed many tactics to protest alongside other women. As Suzanne Bernie in her book review of ‘Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary,’ by Anita Anand writes:
But it was in joining the Women’s Society for Social and Political Union, a militant suffragist group, that Sophia became a true crusader. Soon she was marching on Parliament, dodging census takers and refusing to pay her taxes — adopting a familiar rallying cry, “No taxation without representation” — along with “the most vilified women in England,” a galaxy of early feminists. Swathed in exquisite furs, a lone brown face amid a surge of white ones, Princess Sophia Duleep Singh repeatedly skirmished with the police during protests. On one occasion, she threw herself at Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s car, shouting slogans and pulling from her muff a banner that read “Give Women the Vote!” Many of her fellow suffragists were imprisoned; some went on hunger strikes and endured brutal force feedings that nearly killed them. As Anand demonstrates, British imperialism was as ruthlessly repressive at home as it was on the subcontinent.
As the right to vote becomes challenged in many countries the world, it is increasingly vital to remember the contributions and sacrifices made by so many women in the fight to vote. In this critical election, that is, of the United States, we must remember that in the 100 years that women have fought for, and won their right to vote, that there are still structures within our institutions that depend on us not showing up to vote and to disengage from politics entirely. It is our job to continue registering people vote, to keep holding politicians accountable, and to show up in the streets and demand better from government. Electoral politics is not the only thing that can free us from these chains.
