Basically, the entire book becomes a damning indictment of the British empire. The British took the Punjab and the Koh-I-Noor in an act of highway robbery, ruthlessly exploited the subcontinent for many decades, and massacred peaceful civilians when their grip began to slip. Although many Indians did seem to favour partition, the British policy of partition began as a calculated ploy to set their colonial subjects against each other, so that (like a certain empire still clinging to life today) they could claim that their regime was necessary to prevent internecine warfare. At home, they set on the suffragists with insane violence. En masse, the London police beat and sexually assaulted women in the streets; when the imprisoned women went on hunger strike, protesting that they ought to be categorised as political prisoners, prison wardens and doctors force-fed them, resulting in unimaginable physical and mental trauma. Although I'm discomfited by some of Pankhurst's tactics, I'd be looking for things to burn down too if one of my sisters was killed by police brutality. Anita Anand leaves BBC2's Daily Politics for 5 Live role". BBC News. 12 July 2011 . Retrieved 6 November 2016. Anita Anand ( / ˈ ɑː n ə n d/ AH-nand; [1] born 28 April 1972) is a British radio and television presenter, journalist, and author. Anand, Anita (27 September 2005). "At the heart of a heated debate". BBC News . Retrieved 21 October 2021.

A groundbreaking work that at last tells the important story of Sophia Duleep Singh: unflinching princess-in-exile, doughty moderniser and tenacious suffragette. From the streets of India to the corridors of power, Sophia artfully examines the tensions between East and West; and one woman's choice between fighting for freedom and staying silent * Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire *Sometimes you hear biographers complain that all the great figures have gone ... In this book, her confident and compelling debut, the BBC journalist and presenter Anita Anand leaves that argument in shreds ... Anand has triumphantly rescued Sophia from the pampered oblivion in which a fearful Raj sought to bury her. In doing so, she traces the excruciating double binds, emotional as much as political, that tied imperial Britain to the jewel in its crown * Boyd Tonkin, Independent Book of the Week * After his death, the British used the confusion surrounding his heirs' succession to move into the area. Most of the adult heirs died suspiciously. When it was over, the ruler of this prosperous area was an 1o year old boy, Duleep. His mother was very politically astute so the British had her exiled from the country and then forced the child-king to sign over his lands and the symbol of his rule, the Kor-i-Noor diamond. Journalism and history are curious cousins, because it means that the mind has to ask similar questions such as: What happened? Why did it happen? And in some cases: How can one stop this from happening again?” Levin, Angela (7 August 2012). "My perfect weekend: Anita Anand, radio and TV presenter". The Daily Telegraph. London . Retrieved 16 December 2018.

Laura says: I love Louise O'Neill. She's a beautiful Irish writer who came to prominence a few years ago for her novel, Asking For It. The book very much tells the story on its own terms and historical context. There is no attempt made to try and link events to current events and themes. Overall this is refreshing (such comparisons are frequently over-bearing, presumptuous – the reader can choose to draw her/his own links and anachronistic). Sophia seems to have been a woman in search of a purpose in life. At one point she became a famous socialite and fashion icon; then a successful dog breeder and show competitor; and then abandoned it all to throw herself into the suffragette cause (she was never prosecuted for her militant activities because of her connection to her godmother Queen Victoria). Her life intersected with a whole cast of famous characters and some who should be more famous but aren't--like her, they were women and/or non-whites and their stories were systematically hidden from public view.This is Anand’s mission, as she sees it: To serve as a record-keeper and record-corrector. It’s a role she plays in her two other books, The Patient Assassin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge and the Raj (2019; released to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar), and Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond (2017; co-authored with Dalrymple); and in her fourth, an upcoming work on Olive Christian Malvery (1871-1914), known as the world’s first woman undercover journalist. “She was also of Indian origin. She exposed the terrible practices in work offices, factories, markets and anywhere women were employed and exploited. She was brave, intrepid and everything I like in a character,” Anand says. Anita Anand’s book focuses on Sophia (right), the youngest of Duleep’s sixth children from his first marriage (he had two other children from his second marriage as well as, according to Anand, children out of marriage). Quiet and unassuming in many ways, Sophia nevertheless mirrored in her own life many of the tremors running through British society. After a spell of acting the debutante, in thrall to the demands of British aristocracy and Parisian fashion, living in one of a number of grace-and favour apartments at Hampton Court that were usually handed out to relatives of men who had martyred themselves in the colonial cause, Sophia took up, in succession, cycling, smoking and entering dogs in contests. But as the pleasures of the turn of the century brought in their wake various manifestations of social and political crisis, her attention turned to other things. The mistreatment of sailors from India known as lascars, the plight of subcontinental soldiers caught in the trenches of the first world war and the cause of Indian self-determination would capture varying levels of her attention. A fascinating biography of a historical figure who, along with her family, deserves to be better known. Sophia Duleep Singh was the daughter of the last Maharajah of the Sikh Empire and raised in Britain, with Queen Victoria as her godmother. Her father presented the Koh-I-Noor diamond to the Queen. Duleep Singh was then raised by British people until Queen Victoria decided that he was really cute and wanted him to go to England. She lavished attention on him and considered herself to be his best friend. He was not reunited with his mother until he was an adult.

Anand has also written articles for India Today and The Asian Age newspaper, and used to write a regular column in The Guardian ("Anita Anand's Diary", 2004–2005 [10] [11]). It was an appropriate place to begin, because Anand, an experienced political journalist, knows the parliamentary scene well. There may also be a degree of identification between author and subject. Both were born in London but with family history from the same part of India; as Anand remarked in an online interview with Gargi Gupta, "she was Punjabi, as am I". She further explained that her own interest in Sophia originated in a 1913 photograph of her selling The Suffragette newspaper outside Hampton Court (where the princess lived in a royal grace-and-favour house, much to the chagrin of the authorities as her activism increased). In researching the book, Anand drew upon the papers of Sophia’s father, Maharajah Duleep Singh, as well as intelligence and police records detailing links with suffragettes and Indian nationalist leaders. By a nice irony, she pointed out, it was the very thoroughness of British bureaucracy that enabled Sophia’s story to be fully told for the first time (www.dnaindia.com 18 January 2015).

Anand was privately educated at Bancroft's School in Woodford Green in Redbridge, east London. [4] Anand then entered King's College, London, in 1990, graduating with a BA in English in 1993. From the debris of her father’s defalcated dynasty (a Game of Thrones-esque story in itself), Sophia channelled her fury into becoming the patron saint of the underdog. She built shelters for neglected migrant workers, treated wounded Indian soldiers (more than a million of whom fought for Britain in the First World War), and battled for the advancement of women both British and Indian. Her involvement with the Indian independence movement was limited by her life in England, but she still knew and supported prominent pre-war campaigners for political reform. The accounts of her visits to India give really interesting insight into colonial India. She never lived there, although one of her older sisters settled in Lahore. Throughout her life Sophia’s relationships with her five siblings were deeply important to her, something conveyed very well in this biography. She also loved animals and bred dogs, with a particular fondness for pomeranians. I appreciated the unconventional lives of all three sisters: Sophia never married, Catherine settled in Germany with a female life partner, and Bamba attempted to become a doctor in American before moving to India. The British colonial authorities were so concerned about the destabilising effect the family’s influence could have on the Punjab that for decades they were forbidden from going to India at all. When they did, their activities were closely (and clumsily) monitored by the colonial authorities. During WWI Sophia became a volunteer nurse and fundraiser for Indian troops; during WWII she sheltered evacuees. Delightfully, Anand was able to speak to the evacuees themselves for this book. The detail that Sophia made a little girl promise to always use her vote is very moving.

Miss Anand writes extremely well. Whilst it is clear that she respects and admires her subject, her writing does not appear to me to be sycophantic; certainly, Sophia is not presented as a paragon of virtue but as committed, caring but sometimes a little eccentric and irascible individual seeking a role in life in a country determined to deny her one.

About the contributors

Sophia and her family cannot be understood without understanding the context of developments in the British Empire in this period. Giving details on the development of Sikh traditions, revolutionary ferment in the Indian subcontinent, the British suffrage movement, the First World War, and the partition of India and Pakistan, Anand presents a comprehensive and valuable historical biography. Anand has gone into key archives at Windsor, the Museum of London and elsewhere to uncover the official records and surviving correspondence about Sophia, enriched by photographs and her own interviews. This is a necessary biography, drawing attention to the broader facets of the British suffragette movement and the depth of connections between the Indian subcontinent and Britain in the Victorian and Edwardian eras * The Times * Anand, Anita (2015). Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1408835456. Sophia and her sisters were able to get to India as adults. The experience of meeting people fighting for Indian independence awoke the political consciousness of Sophia. She returned to England and threw herself into the fight of Women's Suffrage in the 1910s.