Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary

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This is fiction, but it's loosely based on things that have happened in the past. It's about this woman whose body is found after this big party on a little fictional island in West Cork. It's uncomfortable to read but compulsive - you can't put it down. I absolutely devoured it. This young girl's body is found and no one's ever arrested, but there's this understanding that the small community know who did it. And then 10 years later, this film crew comes along to make a documentary about the murder and it all kind of unravels.

The audiobook narration by Tania Rodrigues was superb. The accent was British, utterly delightful and easy to follow. I did have trouble with the Indian names, but this never became a problem. The written book and the narration both get five stars. 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). Anand is a patron of the Richmond Society [17] and of the Museum of Richmond. [19] See also [ edit ]Sophia was especially awesome. I like that she got involved in activism in her 30's. I like how she used her class privilege/ princess status to get more attention for women's rights. Meera says: In so many ways I love it. Sophia Duleep Singh was the granddaughter of the last Maharajah of the Punjab. Her father, Duleep Singh, was taken to England and became Queen Victoria's pet. His daughters were all brought up in grace and favour of Queen Victoria. And the deal was: As long as you behave yourself, I will give you all this money. You are my pet. Never think of India again. Sophia is so well researched that this is likely to remain a definitive account ... Anand's passion shines * Daily Express * Dalrymple, William; Anand, Anita (2017). Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World's Most Infamous Diamond. Bloomsbury Publishing, ISBN 978-1-63557-076-2. British Council complies with data protection law in the UK and laws in other countries that meet internationally accepted standards.

What do you do if you are the daughter of an estranged Indian royal family marooned in the heart of late-Victorian and Edwardian London? You join the ranks of the various revolutionaries and other assorted malcontents, while maintaining social proprieties to the very end. Sophia is the sort of remarkable, almost unbelievable untold true story that every writer dreams of chancing upon. A wonderful debut, written with real spirit and gusto. Anita Anand has produced a winner It turned out to not be very hard to dig up unusual information on Singh. “People didn’t know anything about her. Everything was new. And I was very happy to find people who were still alive who had known her,” Anand says. “Those people brought to life what I was learning in dusty files and once-classified documents in British archives. Those people made her real.” In July 2011 Anand left the Daily Politics to present a new show called Double Take on Radio 5 Live on Sunday mornings. [7] In June 2012, Anand took over from Jonathan Dimbleby as the presenter of Radio 4's Any Answers? Saturday current affairs phone-in programme between 2:00 and 2:45pm. [8] One might have understood their need for positive optics after refusing to return the north Indian kingdom to its Punjabi king. The East India Company had been circling Punjab for decades, and, on the death of Sophia’s grandfather, King Ranjit, it had seized its opportunity. It posed as a friend, offering to help protect the young King Duleep from external threats, and then forced him and his mother, the formidable Jindan Kaur, into exile in Britain, separating him from everything he knew.I can't stop won't stop talking about this. A truly remarkable life, one that passed into so many significant parts of the 19th and 20th centuries. I know precious little about Indian history, but Sophia has inspired me to learn more.

Sophia is the sort of remarkable, almost unbelievable untold true story that every writer dreams of chancing upon. A wonderful debut, written with real spirit and gusto. Anita Anand has produced a winner' William Dalrymple Part II of the book describes Sophia's life as an activist, primarily as a suffragette. It gives a good picture of the later more militant part of the suffrage movement, specifically her involvement in the WSPU under Emmeline Pankhurst. Most of my reading about suffrage has been about the movement in the US, so the information was good, but the level of violence by the organization was a surprise to me, specifically the firebombing. Although Sophia didn't firebomb anything, she did participate in acts that resulted in arrest for others, but not for her because of her political visibility. 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. In 1876 Sophia Duleep Singh was born into royalty. Her father, Maharajah Duleep Singh, was heir to the Kingdom of the Sikhs, a realm that stretched from the lush Kashmir Valley to the craggy foothills of the Khyber Pass and included the mighty cities of Lahore and Peshawar. It was a territory irresistible to the British, who plundered everything, including the fabled Koh-I-Noor diamond. This is an interesting history of both the British in India and women's fight for the vote, and all the oppression that went with them. Princess Sophia Duleep Singh and her ancestors provide an excellent lens through which to view those histories.Anand was then on maternity leave for the first of her two children (Hari,12 and Ravi, 8) with husband Simon Singh, a scientist and science writer. She became intrigued by the rare and forgotten Indian suffragette in this old photo. “Sophia Duleep Singh had this fascinating story, as the daughter of the last Sikh ruler of Punjab, Maharajah Duleep Singh — also the man who was compelled to hand over the Kohinoor to British forces. As a Punjabi myself, I felt I had to tell this story.” My first major role on an award-winning, crowd-rousing, primetime British television show, Bodyguard, as the suicide-bomber Nadia, became a national talking point on the portrayal of South Asian women on screen. To be the poster person of this timely moment of discourse felt terrifying. It made me question my internal GPS: what was my own position in this global conversation on representation? 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. Dale, Iain (21 September 2009). "Iain Dale's Diary: Daily Politics: Who Will Cover For Anita Anand?" . Retrieved 6 November 2016.

As a keen student of Indian history, I have always been appalled by much British conduct towards India and Indians. The treatment meted out to the descendants of Duleep Singh was particularly obnoxious. Initially Sophia was well received but was never viewed as being "one of us"to be able to marry, or have children here, a country which she viewed as home. As a result, she threw herself into a number of causes, plainly looking for the fulfilment denied her in her personal life. In this way, the book might be useful less as the story of a specific person than as a snapshot of the issues of her day. Sophia Duleep Singh faced discrimination both as a woman and as an Indian, saved from penury (and prison and force-feeding) only by the happenstance of having been born Queen Victoria's goddaughter. If you don't know much about early Indian nationalists or the suffragettes (I didn't even know precisely who Emmeline Pankhurst was), this book will be endlessly fascinating. Anita Anand's gripping book is a sad story of dispossession and dislocation ... The story is fast-paced and thrilling ... A noble book **** * Daily Telegraph * In addition to Sophia's life story, author Anita Anand also discusses the connections between the campaigns for women's suffrage and Indian independence. Mahatma Gandhi admired the activism of British suffragettes and studied their tactics. Sophia's family also receives extensive attention as her parents and siblings also had interesting lives shaped by British rule over India. Anand vividly paints the picture of a society girl turned revolutionary ... With deftness and sensibility, Anand tells of the extraordinary contradictions at the heart of the relationship between the Queen and this family ... Anand's skill is to bring to life a character whose name does not figure in the annals of the suffragette movement * Observer *Sophia’s letters are gone, but the author has found people who lived with her during the Second World War, evacuees and children and the housemaid. What they have to say is revealing. The book covers the entire lives of all the family members. 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. The book is filled with the prominent figures of late 19th and early 20th century Britain. Sophia's brother Victor was a close friend of Lord Carnarvon (who sponsored the discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb) and Sophia herself worked closely with the suffragette leader Emmaline Pankhurst. Sophia's social circle also included suffragettes who are little known today but were influential in their times. Wow, I really loved this book. All the way through, except for the very beginning, which now in retrospect I think was good. I was going to give the book four stars. By the end, I realized I had come to know Sophia so very well and I liked her so very much that I simply had to give the book five stars. I was happy that the author focused on Princess Sophia Alexandra Duleep Singh (1876 – 1948), even though any of the siblings could have been the focus of a book. 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.