Empire: World History - 371. The First British Indians: Last Sikh In Lahore (Ep 3)

Episode Date: June 24, 2026

Who was Bamba Duleep Singh, the self-styled 'Queen of the Punjab'? How did she survive Partition to become one of the last Sikh residents of Lahore? Why did she turn her back on British high society in favour of radical Indian revolutionaries? Why was her attempt to become the first Indian female doctor thwarted?  In Episode 3 of this series, William and Anita discuss the extraordinary life of the eldest Duleep Singh sister, Princess Bamba.   Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com. Try Attio for free at attio.com/empire  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor:  Imogen Marriott Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening, and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mptopuuk.com. This episode is brought to you by Atio, the CRM of the new way of going to the market. On our show, we trace how people, power and ideas move through history. Often, what changes the story is not ambitious alone, but the system behind it. For businesses, a CRM has long kept a simple record, who you spoke to, what was said, and where things stood. Atio is the only agent-native CRM, built for teams and AI agents to work together across every customer relationship.

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You need diary entries and poetry that capture the scale of emotions, the secret correspondence of a diplomat and the sharp discerning insights of the era's great thinkers. And it's this art of the deep dive that the London Review of Books champions. They bring together the world's leading thinkers and interrogate a rich range of topics through long form essays. Try three months of the LRB completely free when you sign up today. Subscribe at LRB.me forward slash trial. That is LRB.m.m. forward slash trial to try three months of the London review of books for free. Just do it. It's the most wonderful journal in the country and you will never regret it. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnden.

And me, William Durunple. So this is now part three of the four we're going to be doing on the daughters of the last Maharaja at the Punjab. We've met Sofia, now famous from Anita's fantastic book. Unknown 10 years ago. Now one of the most celebrated figures of British Indian history, is fair to say, I think. We met last week the far less well-known. and far more private, Catherine, with her friend living in Prussia and fleeing away from England. And today, Anita, you are going to introduce us to the one who went home to India, to the Punjab.

Yeah, this week, we're going to meet. I think she's going to be your favourite, Bamba, the Queen. You like a difficult woman. She sounds pretty stroppy to me. Yeah, I think you like a stroppy woman. Testament to that is this podcast. But look. I would say so.

I wasn't going to say anything. No, I'll say it for you. It's okay. Self-styled Queen of the Punjab. Bamba Dulip Singh, later Bamba Sutherland. I like the fact that she has a good Scottish connection. The Scots and the Punjabi's both good whiskey drinkers, both great dancers. There's a good essay to be written on Scots-Panjabi collections.

But anyway, we won't go there quite yet. Well, this is the episode for you then. Like Bamba is the eldest of the Duleep Singh sisters. She's born in London in 1869. she dies in Lahore in Pakistan in 1957. 57! Yeah, not that long ago. Within living memory, not that long ago at all. So I should clarify, you know, there are two Bambas in this story.

There is Mahorani Bamba, her mother, the one who Dilip Singh married. Half German, half Ethiopian. Indeed, and the one who he finds in the Cairo mission. And then there is Princess Bamba, who we're talking about today. Who is a beauty, as we discovered last time. She's the most beautiful of the sisters. See, you think she's, I think she's ferociously beautiful, but she wasn't deemed to be beautiful in her day

because she was darker-skinned. I mean, you know, terrible, but true. That's still not just then, today in India, the same prejudice is very much around. Yeah, I mean, look, the story of Bamba, in a nutshell, is this is a woman who refused to ever accept what the British did to her father. And eventually, she will go and try and reclaim her father's stolen kingdom.

Weird. Like, honestly, it's very quick. exotic, though, you know, like a tilting in the wind. She buys a house five minutes walk from Lahore Fort, and she will stay there throughout the rise and the fall of the British in India, through partition, through the creation of Pakistan, and that is where she dies, and that is where she is buried. It's another fantastic story, and again, quite different from the others. I think you've got to do a new edition of your book, Anita.

Do you think? Three volume. Excavate all these, this new material. Yeah. Oh, did I finish the book that I've been commissioned to write first? 25 years late. Oh dear. So Bamba was born on the 29th of September, 1869, and she's born in Knightsbridge and the third child of Maharaja Dilip Singh and Bamber Mullah, the mother, after whom she's named.

What does it mean, Bamber? Arabic for pink? Pink, that's right, yeah, because the reason that Bamba, the mother was given the nickname is because she was so shy and so retiring that she blushed whenever she was noticed. and that's why people called her Bamba. But this is a Bamba who's going to spend the whole of her life trying to be noticed and kicking up Merry Hell. Let me tell you what kind of child she is. Okay, so she is, you know, when I told you in the last couple of episodes,

that the children were constantly under surveillance and you have reports that are being sent to Queen Victoria about how they're getting along because Queen Victoria stepped into the vacuum left by mother and father. And you've got Victor Imperious will become a terrible, incurable gambler. Freddie, obstinate, Catherine, secretive. Princess Bamber described as having the worst temper in the nursery, noted from the age of three.

And, you know, you can understand that as well, Willie, because, you know, the father spends so many months away from his family. When he comes home and he ignores his wife, barely plays with his children. But he does. What she does take from him are the stories about India, about the Golden Temple, about the Lahore Fort, about their grandmother, Jindon, and their grandfather, Ranjit Singh, the Lion of Punjab. And, you know, the sisters receive these in very different ways. Bamber takes them straight into her heart. They are her birthright. Whereas Catherine, you know, her mind is in the land of the grim fairy tales and with Lena. It doesn't really care so much about them. But it's specifically the fact that he's been dispossessed, isn't it? That's it.

That's it. That's irritates and obsesses. And not without reason. No. He's lost the richest kingdom in India and all the jewels and all the land and all the everything. You know, and they are now living in grace and favor mansions, farther absent, and no wonder that this is something that she regrets and thinks back on. It is an unvirtuous circle because she hates the British and she's the one who decides to refer to Queen Victoria's

as Mrs. Fagan, as her father did, the receiver of stolen goods, always irked by what was taken from the family. And you know that sort of disdain is returned and some by Queen Victoria. Queen Victoria really doesn't like Bamba. She is difficult. Catherine is weird. They are not her goddaughters. They're not her problem. But she kind of looks after them as, you know, light-handedly because of Sophia, the one that she really does care for. And Bamba feels this. You know, Who is there to love Bamba, apart from her sisters? She is the least favoured in the family, but all she has are her sisters. She loves them dearly.

They are proper sort of, you know, fingers and a fist. Together they can do anything, but they are against the world. That is her psychology, so you need to understand that straight away. Now, in the last episode, we saw Catherine and Bamba go to Oxford, but Bamba doesn't prosper there at all, does she? Doesn't bother. It can't be asked to do the exams and leads without it. degree of any sort? Any accolade at all? No, no. And she's kind of sort of dismissed as being something of an idiot. You know, Catherine managed to get her degree, although you couldn't get a degree.

She passed her exams. Bamba, I'm afraid to say, did not prosper, is what was reported. But this is not to suggest, and I will give you evidence that this woman was stupid. She wasn't on the contrary. She was really intelligent. She just did not want to do what she was told. And is there a feeling that she's straining against establishment even at Oxford? Is that, I mean, is it that she doesn't like these English dons and just wants to tell them to piss off? She doesn't like to be told what to do. Full stop.

That's it. You know, she, probably, and again, this is Willie's supposition, because we don't have it in her words. But you see it in the photographs, right? You see the scowl. She has a very imperial scowl. In the, she never smiles in any of these photographs from Somerville.

She's annoyed. And I think what it was is that, you know, people were trying to treat her like a puppet, you know, and she wanted to cut the strings. She, as the granddaughter of Ranjit Singh, wanted to decide what she did. She wanted to decide what her future was. And at the turn of the century, she does something genuinely, genuinely surprising. She announces that she wants to be a doctor. Now, that's what I mean about somebody who's unintelligent, wanting that.

Those things don't marry up at all. So I think you've got a very keen mind who just, you know, didn't. want to do it. I don't want to do the things I don't want to do. But when it's her own idea, when she can leave England and do something else, that is what she does. So in 1890, this is 1900, it's remarkable that a woman wants to be a doctor that she has that kind of ambition. And she wants to go to America to study there. Well, ideally she wants to go to India, but the British will never let her go there. You know, Catherine and Sophia understand that. You know, having a D-Leep Singh on the loose in India is everybody's

nightmare here in London because you become a focus point for all of the malcontents in Punjab, right? So they don't want her there. And throughout the whole of British Indian history deposed royals and moved around to keep them away. And so you have Bahad Shah Zha, the mogul emperor as we saw in our mutiny series sent off to Burma, the king of Burma sent off to India, anywhere, but where they should be and where they can stir up resentment against the Raj. So yeah, she's got a point. She can't go to India. The only place, the only option, really, is America. In the English-speaking world, it is the only place where a woman can realistically get a medical degree.

Could she not do it in England, or just doesn't want to do it there? There are no medical degrees. Look, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson broke through in 1865 getting a medical license, but she had to get it through the back door of the Society of Apothecaries, and then the society changes its rules. It is really very, very difficult. And she doesn't want to stay here anyway. So on the 30th of January 1900, Bamba Books Passage on a ship called the Koenig Albert, a German ocean liner bound for the Far East, seems to be wanting to travel to San Francisco via Japan in 1900.

But, you know, we know about her arrival in America because the American press love a royal. They loved a royal then and they love a royal now. They do, as we have seen lately, exactly. So, you know, they're willing to love her. There are reporters waiting at the pier for the Kernel Albert to dog, and they are waiting to be charmed by the Indian princess from the far east exotic. What they get is something quite different. She's not playing. She is not game for this at all.

This is what they write. A dark, timid-looking woman of small stature who was the object of much attention on the pier was Princess Bamba delet Singh. She had a large assortment of baggage beside two fine dogs, one of great. Dane named Leon, the other a beautiful cream-colour Russian wolfhound, the name of which she refused to dive off. And then when they ask her, they report that she just screams at them, leave the dogs alone and don't you put anything in the paper about them either. So she's not playing at all. Like she just hates it. Interestingly, the whole dog thing is again a continuity because Jindon's, their grandmother's father had been the kennelkeeper. Kennellkeeper's daughter.

Yeah. Yeah. You're right. Echoes of the past. And we know that Sophia does these Pomeranians, but she has more my kind of dog. I love the idea of a big Russian wolf hand. Enormous beasts. Well, I mean, Safara also, she goes from Pomeran to Borzoys.

If you like a big dog, she's into the Boersoys as well. And she wins the Crofts with them as well. But look, Bambert, for a brief moment, is magnificent in Chicago. She's living on West Adams Street. She is going to the women's medical college every day. one of the few non-white women in American medicine in 1901, fewer than a thousand medical students in the entire country. But you know what?

It is hard. Again, an extraordinary story in itself this. Even without all the other stuff. It's just amazing. I'm so glad you think so delighted. You should write a book in it. Now, anyone that's been to Chicago knows that it is effing cold in winter. The winds blow off the lake,

notorious Chicago freezing winds and it gets to well 1415 below zero in winter streets unpaid frozen mud and she is in a sense the first South Asian woman of many today trying to qualify as a doctor in the United States Yeah you can't move for tripping over

Indian women doctors these days but it wasn't real but it was like you know a very rare unicorn sighting in those days and what makes it worse the weather was bad And remember she hated the weather in England as well. And this is worse, yeah. The locals are unkind to her as well because, you know, she's not charmed the press. She hasn't got them unside.

And her walks to the medical college are torture. There are reports in the paper of how she's complained because she's pelted with lumps of snow on her way to the college. And sort of she sort of shouts at the press. And it's a rough place, Chicago at this point, isn't it? I mean, presumably Al Capone's already in business at the college. this point, it's not a safe or easy place to be living. I think Al Capone comes a lot later, but you get the idea. It is not the nicest place for her. And the press, instead of sort of taking her side and saying this is really outrageous treatment, can we just treat our guests a bit

nicer? They just really revel in breaking into her rooms, describing what's in her knicker drawers, and also writing about her losing her rag with the locals. You know, she sort of screams at the press, you know, that, when she's pelted with the snow, or she's asked about the snow pelting. She goes, such things would never be permitted in England. I shall leave Chicago. I've never encountered such rude people in my life. So you can see, you know, she's just full of rage and anger.

Most 23 out of the 24 hours of the day. But she sticks it out for almost three years, she does. But does she complete her course? Does she become a doctor? Well, God, William, she does complete her coursework. She's about to, or she should be, graduating with her medical. qualification, but in the summer of 1902, the trustees of

Northwestern University decide in all their wisdom that women, full stop, cannot be doctors after all. She's gone right through this training and then they've sort of taken it all the way. Yeah, women cannot grasp surgery. That is a direct quote from the university. So she sails back to

England in June 1902, completely defeated. You know, Catherine had her escape route through Lena. Sapphire is happy to sit in Faraday House. She can't understand it, but okay, so be it. She does not want to be there. So, you know, whatever her rage was, it's now burning with the fire of a white hot sun. She comes back, but she has an attitude problem right from the beginning. And there are reports of her just being very

rude and demanding around Faraday House about where and when she should be allowed to leave, how people talk to her. She keeps complaining about life there. Does her sister resent her rude to everybody. Do they get on? So her sister finds her tricky but loves her and her sister will actually push back against, because Bamba when she comes back into Savaya's life, keeps telling her you cannot trust these white people. You can't

trust them. You cannot. Why are you friends with them? Why are you going to these parties? Why are you so happy that you're in their magazines? They hate hate us and she keeps saying, no, they don't hate us. They don't hate us. Look, can't you just be a bit easier? But she's loyal to Bamba.

She's never going to leave her sister's side. Like I said, these sisters have an unusually close bond. So, do you remember I told you about the Delhi Darbar of 1902, which radicalises Sapphire? You did. Now, whose idea is this to go off uninvited to the Delhi Darbar and present themselves? Is this Bamba's own idea? It's Bamba's idea. It's Bamber who says, I don't care if the Secretary of State is not going to let us. We're going anyway. So nobody's surprise that this is, you know, some fool plan from the really awkward sister. She's her father's. daughter. She's great, but she gets so much further than he did. And when she goes to India, when she

goes to Lahore, you know, standing in the Shalimar Gardens where her father played as a boy, going to the Golden Temple in Amritsa, you know, she decides she is staying here. She is going to live and die here and, you know, stuff it to anyone who doesn't want her to do that. And I mean, with good reason, in the not only is it home, it's one of the great cities of the world. At Lahore, you and I, have been together in Lahore and it's one of the greatest places to live. I'd love to live Lahore. Shalimabad, gorgeous, gorgeous demal, the gorgeous museum, the Jadugar, the Zamzum Guns sitting sitting on its plinth on the road. I'd move to Lorna in a flash. Anyway, she does. She does. So when Sophia comes back to see her, because Sophia's trying to say, why are you staying now? Why don't

you just come home? Because Sophia misses her. You know, Catherine's gone off with Lena. She's all on her own. She keeps begging her to come back and Baba keeps saying, not on your Nellie, I'm not going anywhere. If you want to see me, come and see me. But then more alarmingly, she writes to Sophia, who doesn't want to go to Lahore, doesn't have that connection with Lahore yet. She writes and says, I think the British are trying to kill me. I'm really ill, and I think they're trying to poison me. And that's what Sophia does go and visit her and sort of tries to put her back on her feet and try to understand. And presumably there's no truth in this, is there? Well, no, I don't think there is. But Bambert definitely thought there was.

And Sophia, who turns up thinking that Bamba is nuts, then starts to believe actually there is a conspiracy against her sister. People are being cruel to her every day. It is not beyond a stretch of imagination that she's being followed because Sophia sees that they're being followed and surveilled. But poisoning, I don't think so. I don't think so. And I don't think Sophia thought so as well. But what's her status? Because as we saw, her father was actually physically taken off the ship at Aden.

They haven't done this to her. They've let her land. They may be following her. They may be being rude to her, but they haven't actually sort of, I mean, is she allowed to just arrive and settle there by the Rajanthor? It is. They let her be because they figure by this time, you know, there's not what, what's the worst that can happen?

Everyone's forgotten about them. Everyone's forgotten about them. But what they don't realize is everyone hasn't forgotten about them, and particularly the nationalists haven't forgotten. So people like Gopal Krishna Gorkhali, who is the teacher of Gandhi, the reason Gandhi comes back to India, he comes to pay his respects hugely. Important figure in the Indian National Congress in the turn of the century. Lala Lajpetrae, who's this firebrand, who is the very genesis of this idea of Swadeshi,

that, you know, we will make our stuff, we will sell our stuff, and we will keep the profits. We are self-reliance is what Indians need and deplores the depredations going on, the colonial depredations in the country. So she starts mixing with those people And it's through her that Sapphire meets these radicals, as they would have been called in those days, and becomes politicised. There is one gorgeous moment.

And I'll just tell you very briefly, but you like a feisty woman. And I think we did cover this in our episode with Ram Ghaua when we talked about Gandhi and some of the women in his circle. Sophia comes back after a ride, and she comes back to the home that Bamba has set up in Lahore, the palms, very near Shalimar Gardens. Next to the Shalimar Gardens,

which is exactly where I would settle the palms. Yeah. So there she is. Bamba's not at home. She's at some mystery meeting, because Bamba does keep disappearing off from mystery meetings while Sophia is there. And she sees this woman waiting patiently on the veranda.

And she's obviously blown away because she writes about it in her diary, but she writes with such care that it took a long time for me to unravel who she was, because I hope why she made such an impression, you know, this woman who is referred to as a nice Bengali woman and is referred to only by a very innocuous name, which then I sort of traced back and is actually linked to Saraladevi Jodrani, who is a firebrand revolutionary. That's a match for Bamber. These two will get on. Yeah, a very dangerous woman is what they call her. Like, you know, to the point where, and again, go back and listen to our Gandhi episode.

my friends. She runs training camps for Indians to learn how to do battle with the British. And she does these sort of meditation, meditations where people come and they have to chant the name of revolutionaries, including, although, you know, he wasn't a revolutionary, the grandfather of Bamar Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the Maharaja of the Punjab. So, you know, Sala Devi is a huge figure in the resistance movement of the day and from a really interesting lineage as well. Nees of Tagore. Yeah, the Nobel laureate, Rabindana Tagore, absolutely. So, you know, she's from a very posh family. Anyways, so you get the idea who Bamba is running with. There is an interesting thing that Bamba does that none of the other sisters do. Really, really strange. She gets married.

And she gets married to a man. Well, the way she announced it to her family, really, is that really very weird. In 1915, so it's the middle of the First World War, she sends a telegram to her family and in it, she writes, I should now be addressed as Princess Bamba Sutherland, because she's married a Scotsman. Well, Australian by birth, but a Scotsman. Okay, so tell us a little bit about Colonel David Waters Sutherland. So, yeah, this is Lieutenant Colonel David Waters, Sutherland, Australian by birth, Scottish by ethnicity, born in Victoria, 1871, son of a gold miner, interestingly. And he's come up through the Indian Medical Service. He is the Honourable Surgeon to the Viceroy of India.

But what is extraordinary is that this isn't some sort of handsome Punjabi chap that you might be expected to marry some revolutionary. He is white establishment. Absolutely straightforward Raj central casting. What's she doing with it, Benito? How has this happened? So Bamba has always said throughout her life that she's only attracted to Indian men and Indian people. She also tries to arrange the marriage of Sophia, one of her visits. It's hilarious the way Sophia talks about, you know, these completely inappropriate Indian men that Bamba keeps throwing at her.

She has disdain of English-speaking white people, but then she suddenly marries this Australian colonial doctor 20 years older than her as well. And the reason is twofold. it's money and its legitimacy to stay in Lahore. So there is a proviso. But those rich Punjabi's around in Lahore? She could have done that. Well, she can't get to her own money. So her always, her gripe was that, you know,

they were given a pittance, and there's a mountain of money that rightfully belongs to her family. And when her father dies, there is a provision that is made by the British government that the girls will get a certain amount of money, a stipend. but if two of them marry they will get a dowry okay so it's about a 10,000 pounds worth of dowry they only do this for Catherine and Bamba

and I was trying to understand why they would put that in a huge amount of money for Catherine and Bambor and I sort of think it's because they thought they would never marry because they were so difficult and so useless but Sophia might marry someone quite useful and so she didn't need it so they felt free to put it in Bamba was always trying to get her hands on the money but she had to get married

to have it. And do we know what kind of marriage this was? Do there was there any close to this in this couple? Do they like each other? What's the? Well, so again, I mean, they liked each other, but whether it was a real marriage, I've heard it suggested, and by other historians who toil in this field, that this was a marriage of convenience that, you know, he was away so much. There are no children. You know, he's busy, she's busy. Is he terribly good looking, or do we have any pictures of it? Yeah, I mean, he's fine. He's okay. I have high standards, as you know. You may certainly do, Anita. Your very splendid-looking husband can take a bow at this point. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. But, you know, the thing is that also being married to him,

to the surgeon of the viceroy of India, gives her some kind of protection to stay. So she does get married. He's also Australian. He's not English or Scottish. He's Australian in her eyes. So this marriage does take place how loving it is. Well, they don't spend much time in the same hemisphere

in their married life. So you decide. Anyway, let's take a break and then we'll find out what happens to the woman who is now Princess Bamba Sutherland who is refusing to leave India.

Welcome back to Empire. No, what is intriguing me, Anita? Is there any correspondence from this woman? She just made this marriage that none of us can understand to a kind of random Australian doctor which seems totally out of character.

Do we have any illumination of her thoughts from letters or diaries or anything? The saddest thing in the world is that the conservator of letters was Sophia. And she kept every letter that her family sent to her. They, to my terrible horror, didn't keep any of her letters or they were destroyed or they are lost. And the sisters, their letters, whatever they owned, scattered to the wind. So again, these are things that may come out in people's attic.

So I know the letter about Sapphire finding Catherine dead on the floor was found in an attic in Thetford and a very nice man who I met there said, I've got this letter you might be interested in, just a little bit. So these things may crop up. If anyone is listening, has access to the diaries of Princess Bamba. We both want to read them. Very, very much indeed. But also, I mean, I sort of think it wouldn't be safe for her to keep a diary because she was being surveilled and knew it. Tell us what happens next, 1926.

Let me take you back to 1924, first of all, because this is 60. years after Jindon's death, Bamba personally arranges for her grandmother's ashes to be transferred from Narsik, which is where the British allowed it to be, to Lahore where her grandmother wanted to be. And she and Sophia, Sophia's visiting at the time go to Narsick, they collect them together, they go to a gart on the Godwari River, where the ashes are scattered and they say prayers with a Sikh priest in attendance. So you can just see, you know, that attachment to her family is so strong. Has she converted back to Sikhism?

Is she showing any interest in Sikh religion? I'm really glad you've raised that, actually. There are two things that happen these days with these girls, who people are really keen and for good reason to own. They are always described as Sikh princesses. They were each one of them, Christian. They were born, baptized and remained Christian and had Christian burials and funerals.

And there's no records of them. converting or nothing at all. Reading the guru, Gradsab at home, they were aware of it. They talked about being aware of it, but they wouldn't have described themselves as Sikhs. And you can see that from their funeral arrangement. That's interesting.

Isn't that interesting? Also, they're always described as being Sikh princesses. They were mixed heritage, and everyone sort of deletes that from their mind. The German bit, the Ethiopian bit, yeah. Exactly right. Do you know, the other thing that I should say is that 1926, you see the difference within two years,

who she thinks is her real family and people who are family, but she doesn't accept them. So do you remember I told you about her father having an affair with Ada Wetherall? From the knocking shop. Yes, and we do remember. Absolutely. Well, you know, there are two children who are born to that relationship, and we're going to do a fourth episode on that, because it's a miserable and dark story. What Bamba does to those girls is wicked. She's a great character. People are complicated. I won't tell that story now.

I will tell it in our fourth episode. But let's sort of skip forward to 1939. Her husband dies in Scotland while she's in Lahore. She's 70. Has she seen him for much time or have they been separated? They're just living parallel lives. You know, they're just living parallel lives, Willie, which is, you know, sort of answers your question

where they happily married. I think they were fine. I think they were okay. But it was a marriage to an end. She was clearly a handful. Yeah. Oh, shall I tell you a thing? So when I was researching Sophia, the book, I talked to a woman who had been a maid at Faraday House, and she said all the servants detested Bamba.

They loved Sophia, detested Bamba, because in her words, this is a very elderly woman who was in her 80s who is talking to me. She was a class A, her word, bitch. That's what she said. She said, class A, bitch. They would hide her clothes. They would sort of fold things up and put them in the wrong places just to hear her scream because she was so awful. But look, she is what she is. Her husband, husband, dies thousands of miles away in 1939 in Scotland.

She's in Lahore. Second World War was about to break out, yeah. She's trapped, okay? She can't leave. She's stuck there. And then in 1942, she learns that Catherine has died and has been found by Sophia. She can't go to the funeral. So she's grieving from a distance.

And then in 1947, another great catastrophe, the partition of India. And Lahore, the jewel of the north, a family's ancestral city, which was mixed, you know, Hindu, Sikhs and Muslims. It ends up on the Pakistan side. Now, you and I know how many people decided to leave for being the wrong religion, okay? Yeah. 1.5 million people are killed in this terrific upheaval. Whole populations are on the move backwards and forwards. There is violence.

There is rape. There is bloodshed. There are moments of extraordinary heroism and kindness when people shelter, people who are fleeing mobs and so on at great personal cost. But it's not somewhere you want to be and Bamber's caught in the middle of it. Yeah. And you know, a notably Sikh name. Duleep Singh is her name and people name.

and people know who her grandfather was, but she stays put. And she stays put and is kind of looked after by a Muslim man who's like her factotum, secretary, guide. So, Bejee stays with Bambo. That's a beautiful symmetry. And the only reason she's not killed in the riots, as far as we know, is that Beerji, who is one of the most respected Muslims in the city, vouches for her. And also, I guess in a way she's also protected the not marriage, marriage,

with Sutherland is also a protection because he can say or she can say that she is Mrs. Sutherland, a British doctor's widow, rather than Princess Bamba Dilip Singh, if she needs to. It's a useful identity to have in that period of time. Even though the world is falling apart, she refuses to acknowledge, really, that anything has changed. You know, this is still her home. This is still where she belongs. Another tragedy of her story is that despite being the oldest sister, she's the last to die. She sees her younger sisters, her baby sisters, die before her. So Sophia dies in August 1948.

We know that Catherine died even earlier. So this is really interesting. So some people say she refuses to fly back to England. It wasn't that. It wasn't that she refused to fly her sister's ashes out to India either. She travels by sea and over land because she said her sister was always frightened of flying. She says, I didn't want to take her on a plane

because she didn't like to fly. Although her sister's dead at this point. Yeah, I know, but did you see the closeness of the sister? That said, you know, the flight would have been something unusual at this period and the boat would have been the normal way to go. Yeah, but she actually comments on it, though, really. She says, you know, my sister didn't like flying. That's why I'm not taking her by air.

Yeah. And so, Sophia had asked in her will for her ashes to be returned to India and Bamba, an 80-year-old woman it, is left to her to take them, and she scatters them somewhere secret in Lahore. We don't know. There is, I mean, obviously the gut where Ranjit Singh was cremated, which would have been the obvious place to have taken the Euda thought. It's a sensible guess, but we don't know for sure. She lives another eight years, alone pretty much only with Peeridgee and her company.

The only Sikh left in Lahore after the ethic cleansing of partition. And it's a tragic picture because her sight is failing, her health is failing, is failing. She's constantly writing letters of complaint that she can't get a seat on the bus from model town into the city. She still calls herself to the very end, the queen of the Punjab, the last true sovereign of the Sikhs. But you know, to everybody around her in this new country, Pakistan that is springing up around her, she's an anachronism. She's a weird thing. I interviewed someone who's very like that who was the last descendant of the moguls. And this woman whose ancestors have lived in the Red Fort,

Princess Begum Sultan lived in a tiny little house in the old city and worked in the ICCR library stamping books as people took them out and she wasn't going to leave her city because it was her city and this is I'm sure Bamba was thinking the same

she's going to be the last seek in Lahore she's not going to go just because the government's happened to have changed this is her city this is the home of Ranjit Singh Abdulip Singh she's going to die there how lonely she was because a lot of her friends would be dead or would have crossed the border You know, that's just a fact.

I mean, in her last years, she gets really very dark and she's sort of mulling over all of her anger. She's a woman who's lived all her life in rage. But you have to see how others have dealt with it. And I, you know, I think Sophia then fighting for other people, that's really noble. They all went through the same thing. Catherine discovering peace with Lena. That's also lovely. And she has a life.

She has joy. There's a joy in their lives that does not exist for Bamba. and when she's sort of in her twilight, she starts putting out the story that the reason the entire Dilip Singh line dies with her, none of the children of Dilip Singh have any children. None of them do. With her generation, they're wiped out.

That family disappears off the face of the planet. Sophia doesn't have children. Catherine doesn't have children. Victor doesn't have children. Freddie doesn't have children. Bamba doesn't have children. One of the things that Bamba starts putting around is that when they were,

in England, even when they were children at Elverdon being looked after by nannies, people were putting mystery powders in their food to make them sterile. Now look, you can treat that the way that Sophia treated the story of she's being poisoned. You know, she thought she was being poisoned. Whatever it is, she died, bitter, angry and actually quite alone. There was a thing, wasn't there, of putting bromide into the tea or something? In World War I, soldiers getting randy. So it's not impossible.

Yeah, but who knows? But she's a crazier woman, but you interpreted as that, is it? My feeling, spending so much time with them, is that this is an articulation of anger, rage, and trying to make sense of it all, and the fact that it ends with you, how awful is that? That it's all over, that however great you thought your family were, all over, all gone. So, 957 is now Pakistan is already beginning to go wrong, and she's now 87. Pure G is her last link with the outside world. she's now in a Sikh free city after the ethnic closing of partition

there are no Sikhs at her funeral No The funeral is arranged oddly enough by the deputy High Commission of the British High Commission Which is a sort of terrible irony She would have hated it Can you imagine what she would have thought of that? Yes, exactly right

So she's buried in Lahore's Christian Cemetery on jail road Buried under a Christian cross In a Pakistani cemetery as Willie says no seek to say the final prayers. We should say she died of a heart attack. There's a Persian couplet on her tombstone and it was translated very helpfully by the dawn newspaper, Pakistani newspaper and it goes like this. If you open this grave, you will just not know who is rich and who is poor, which is aligned from Sadi, a great Persian poet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The difference between royalty and civility vanishes when the bones are dug up. Isn't that lovely?

And sad and awful. Very Sufi thought. And her entire collection of Sikh era paintings, her watercolours, her miniatures, her manuscripts, her personal possessions. They all go to Peergy. And there's now a museum where they presumably are on a show. They're inside, yeah, the Lahore Ford. And you can see the Bamba Museum. I've seen it twice now and see all the...

Of course, the Bamba Museum, that's her. I've been there. Yes, absolutely. I hadn't made that collection. Right, right, of course, yes. So, you know, her house has demolished long gone, the roses that she... planted in Ghulzar, they're all gone. You know, everything, almost every sign of her has gone.

But so I'm really glad that we've done this about her because she's really worth knowing. And that story encapsulates so much of the period. I think it's rather wonderful. Next time, though, we're going to talk about things that are rather unlovely about Bamba's history. Two princesses who we've mentioned lightly a few times in this series, Princess Pauline and Princess Irene.

I mean, very much names of the street. The mother was Ada Wetherall, the chambermaid, born out of wedlock in a Moscow boarding house and a Paris apartment, rejected by Queen Victoria, frozen out by three famous sisters, although one of them, Sophia will relent and will be very kind eventually. One dies alone in an unmarked grave in the south of France. During the war, the other walks into the sea off Monte Carlo, 26 years of age she is when she does it, and she does it. leaves a letter behind her saying, I am homeless. Empire Club members can hear that really tragic story right now. But for now at least, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnden. And goodbye from me, William Duremberg.