Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary

by Anand, Anita

  In contrast, all three Duleep Singh sisters were united in their unreserved fondness for Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, a slender, elegant aristocrat, who loved books and hated bad manners. Umrao Singh was also held in high esteem by the British, but unlike the royal from Kapurthala, he never believed in the British right to rule his country. Because he had kept his misgivings largely secret, he had been invited to attend Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in England, as well as the more recent Coronation Durbar in Delhi. Nothing he saw eased his doubts and his home became a haven for subversive conversation. It was one of the few places where anti-Raj sentiments could be aired without fear the conversation might get reported back to the British. Umrao Singh was an elder of the Majithia clan, a prominent family whose ancestors had served as loyal generals in Ranjit Singh’s armies. He had an interest in photography, like Sophia, and spoke five languages. Out of respect, the girls referred to him only by the honorific title Sirdar-ji,9 meaning ‘honoured Sikh’. His wife, Narinder Kumari, they addressed as Sirdarni; she was generous, kind and maternal and her ancestors had been imprisoned by the British for attempting to help Jindan. Sophia would soon become devoted to the couple.

  Umrao Singh Sher-Gil was a passionate member of the Theosophical Society, a movement founded in the United States in 1875. The Theosophists believed in clairvoyance and reincarnation and were ardently non-sectarian.10 Their gatherings traditionally centred on philosophical debate. However, at the turn of the century the movement became overtly political. The English theosophist Annie Besant was causing tension for the British Raj, having already made a name for herself in England as a troublemaker. A leading speaker for the Fabian Society and the Marxist Social Democratic Federation, Annie had actively supported Irish Home Rule, finding herself at the heart of the Bloody Sunday demonstrations of 1887. In central London, over ten thousand protesters had demanded Irish autonomy. When they reached Trafalgar Square, violent clashes with police left three dead and hundreds injured. Besant, as one of the organisers of the march, offered herself to the police for arrest if they would let others go, but they refused to make a political martyr of her.

  Just one year later, Besant organised the London match girls’ strike, leading a predominantly female workforce to walk out of the Bryant & May match factory in Bow, East London. They were protesting against the use of white phosphorus in the manufacturing process, which caused painful and debilitating conditions like ‘phossy jaw’. Workers developed unbearable abscesses in their mouths, facial disfigurement and sometimes fatal brain damage. The protest attracted many idealistic young women. One of them was a twenty-eight-year-old from Manchester. Her name was Emmeline Pankhurst, and she would describe her experience with Besant as life-changing: ‘I threw myself into this strike with enthusiasm, working with the girls and with some women of prominence.’11 Thanks to Annie’s rabble-rousing, Britain eventually banned the use of white phosphorus in all its factories.

  Much to the dismay of the British government, a decade after her victory with the match girls, Besant threatened to light a bonfire under India. Soon after her arrival, groups were spending less time debating the hidden mysteries of the universe and more time talking about practical steps needed to free the country. Through her new friends, Sophia moved in the same circles where whispers of treason against the Raj were circulating. Not since the banishment of her father had the potential volatility of the Punjab been of such concern to the British authorities. In ever greater numbers, intelligence files were opened.

  Against this backdrop of growing political discontent, in 1903 Sophia embarked on the steepest learning curve of her life. She searched for information about her heritage and about India itself. Ranging widely across the former Sikh Empire on horseback, Sophia attempted to get a feel for the homeland her father had been so desperate to take back. For a while Catherine and Bamba accompanied Sophia, but eventually the rigours of her long rides proved too much for them. Sophia loved the intense heat of the Indian afternoons, but her sisters suffered terribly. Bamba in particular needed frequent ice baths to soothe her irritated skin.

  Overcome by the climate, Catherine and Bamba announced their intention to escape to the cool of the Simla Hills. Sophia elected to spend the sticky monsoon months with her new Indian friends in Lahore. Moreover, English acquaintances who happened to be in India at the same time gave her additional reason to stay. The Harlands were an upper-class family from East Sheen whom Sophia had known since she moved to Hampton Court. They made eminently suitable chaperones for the princess in Lahore, so Catherine and Bamba gave their permission for her to remain in the city. For seven weeks Sophia was free to explore Punjab without the opinions of her sisters constantly ringing in her ears.

  When the weather in Lahore became more manageable, Catherine and Bamba returned to discover their sister much changed. She was by now quite at home, and was even attempting to learn the language. They found to their amusement that Sophia had been making a mark on all who met her. She spoke politely to the servants, which set her apart from the brusque Indians who employed them, and went as far as to write letters of thanks to those who particularly impressed her. Bamba found it hilarious that one of Harnam Singh’s servants seemed utterly smitten: ‘Boota Singh has been so amusing keeping me in fits of laughter. I asked him how beautiful he thought he was. He said “middle-class!!” You will be glad to hear he calls you 1st class.’12

  Boota Singh was not the only man to admire Sophia. Kedar Natu, a humble clerk whose knowledge of English had become invaluable to the sisters during their stay in Lahore, came to dote on the youngest Duleep Singh princess. He served as a fixer and translator and Sophia had dropped him a letter of thanks for his efforts. She included a photograph of herself as a keepsake and it became one of Natu’s most prized possessions. To receive such a gesture from a lady of Sophia’s lineage prompted Natu to offer his eternal service, even if that meant leaving India and his own family: ‘In case you don’t get a suitable teacher there and that if it is quite convenient to you and not too much costly I can come over to England for as long time as you may desire.’13

  Sophia declined his offer but accepted all that he could teach her about life in the Punjab, both the dark and the light. He told her about the destructive force of malaria, the indefatigable annual and deadly visitor to the region. He also educated her about the Hindu religious festivals, like Diwali, where under a moonless sky, millions of little lamps were lit all around India to guide one of the Hindu gods home after his years of exile in the wilderness. The skies exploded in a frenzy of fireworks, and Natu told Sophia of the travelling bands of actors who would fill the darkness with the glow of kerosene lamps, enacting scenes from scripture as well as tales from the life of Sophia’s grandfather, Ranjit Singh.

  Sophia cherished anything that shed light on her past. Among her most treasured papers, she kept a letter written to her by the wife of one of Duleep Singh’s long-dead servants, Sheo Ram. When Ram’s widow, Jumuna Bai, heard in 1903 that Duleep’s daughters were in India, she hired a chaprassi, or translating clerk, to write to Sophia. The clerk was tortuously formal, and his English was not as good as advertised, but the warmth of feeling was clear: ‘most respectfully and humbly I venture to encroach upon your valuable thoughts and time by submitting these few lines . . . The letters your Royal father sent to my husband will lend to throw light on the extent of our relations to your interest.’14

  It transpired that Sheo Ram had served Duleep Singh when he too was just a boy. When the Maharajah was exiled to Fategarh, Sheo Ram went with him, leaving behind his own family in the Punjab, knowing that he might never see them again. Over the next five years the loyal servant never left Duleep’s side. He would have stayed with him until death, had he not been forbidden to travel to England with the Maharajah in 1854. Sheo Ram was left behind, alone and unsure what his duties were. Believing that Duleep would one day return, he took to protecting his young master’s private property. He never left his post, and his loyalty a
lmost cost him his life. During the terrifying violence that swept the state during 1857, the faithful servant stood his ground until Fategarh was overrun by rebels intent on burning out the British and all who sympathised with them. Chased from Duleep’s home, instead of melting into anonymity like many servants at the time, Sheo Ram made a perilous trip to the British garrison stationed in Cawnpore (Kanpur) and begged them to return with him, bringing men and arms to save his master’s property.15

  The British had more to worry about than the fortune of some spoiled child, and instead convinced Sheo Ram that if he gathered much-needed intelligence for them he might help end the conflict, allowing them to come back to Fategarh with him. Sheo Ram found himself in some of the worst arenas of battle during 1857. As Major General Outram, the commanding officer at Camp Alum Bagh in Cawnpore testified in his report from the field, Sheo Ram ‘was present at the first relief of Lucknow, and afforded ready assistance during the time of our being besieged there’.16 Sheo Ram was proving himself to be a great asset, but all the while he kept begging the British to come and save Duleep’s home from looters. The commanding officer of another regiment in Ferozepur, Captain T. Brusfer, described both Sheo Ram’s bravery and also his preoccupation: ‘[He] shewed much anxiety, about his employer’s property which he had been obliged to abandon at Farrukhabad, he has always been very respectful and on several occasions attended me in the field, more particularly whilst in Lucknow where he had volunteered to take up and did actually carry arms for my protection.’17

  It seemed from the papers Sheo Ram’s widow passed on to Sophia that Duleep had kept in touch with his most faithful servant during his early years in England. The few letters that he had penned to Sheo Ram had an almost religious significance to his family: ‘I have been left no medium except these holy relics (a copy of which I herewith attach) by which I could have any access to your noble and gracious feet . . . Though we are such insignificant creatures as were never destined to pay our most humble respects personally to the late Maharjah yet (thanks to that art which immortalises the likeness) the photo your Royal Father sent to my husband in 1884 is as sincerely and adoringly loved as if the Maharajah in person.’18 Sophia would treasure Jamuna Bai’s letters till the day she died.

  In late August 1903, after nine months in Punjab, Sophia decided it was time to go home. The timing of her decision vexed her sisters greatly. Catherine and Bamba were planning a dramatic trip across the snow-capped Pahlgam Mountains into Kashmir, and were sure that the journey would appeal to their adventurous little sister. It was the kind of trip that usually filled Sophia with excitement, involving as it did horseback riding along treacherous ridges, camping in the open air and walking for miles in the wind and snow. They were incredulous that Sophia would pass up the chance to go with them, and Bamba was appalled that she was choosing Hampton Court over Kashmir.

  Sophia took the first sailing she could in September, travelling in the company of the Harlands, who were also heading back to England. The family from Sheen might have noticed a profound change in the princess. She was quieter, more serious and seemed preoccupied on the voyage home. Sophia had seen poverty and depravation on a scale that overwhelmed her. Also, for the first time, she had come face to face with all that her family had lost. Never would she find life as a socialite fulfilling again. Looking into the deep waters over the side of her ship she thought about what her life was actually for. The answers would not be found at dog shows and in fashion magazines. Not since the days she had acted as a little mother for her brother Eddie had she felt such a calling to protect someone more vulnerable than herself. It was more than a duty, it was a compulsion. She needed to be useful again, but who exactly needed her?

  As her ship reached the British coast, Sophia would find her answer. Shivering on the docks, thin, dark and hungry, were lascars awaiting the ship from India, ready to unload its cargo. They had no idea that one of the passengers on the vessel would have a profound impact on their miserable lives.

  10

  Patron of Lost Souls

  Most people in Britain had never heard of the lascars. The word itself was exported to India by the Portuguese, thanks to the adventures of the explorer Vasco de Gama. His ships reached the Indian coast at Calicut on 20 May 1498, opening up one of the most lucrative trade routes the world would ever know. Over the course of two centuries the Portuguese word for ‘soldier’ – lachar – morphed into the Hindi word lashkari, but held the same meaning. It was only when the British arrived that the word and its meaning were transformed. Agents of the East India Company began to use the word lascar to describe the ragged merchant seamen they recruited to transport cargo.

  Even though the number of lascars increased dramatically with the growth of the Raj, few knew anything about them. Of those who recognised the name, many owed their knowledge solely to literature. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in his short story The Man with the Twisted Lip, described his lascar as ‘rascally’ and a ‘scoundrel’. In the words of Sherlock Holmes himself: ‘The lascar was known to be a man of the vilest antecedents,’1 and readers were encouraged to fear and loathe him.

  In reality the lascars were among the most wretched and exploited underclasses in British society. Formerly peasant farmers, the majority had been recruited from Punjab, East Bengal and India’s west coast, with the rest coming largely from China. Initially, in the 1700s, the East India Company had been reluctant to hire them, thinking them poor replacements for a British crew. However traders often had no choice. Thanks to desertions and indiscipline from their own men far away from home, by the 1800s, the practice of hiring lascars had grown common. Writing in 1855, a Colonel Hughes, who was then conducting an audit of seafaring personnel, suggested that ‘at the lowest computation’ the British merchant service employed 10,000–12,000 lascars for service in the East Indian, Chinese and Australian trade,2 and about half of these men were brought to Britain every year. Despite the fact they were hired hands and not slaves, the lascars were often treated appallingly on their gruelling ocean voyages.

  Christian missionaries were the first to pay attention to the stories being murmured in the East London docks. Tales of sadistic cruelty and even murder were filtering back thanks to British seafarers who hated what they had seen. So concerned were missionaries, they began to collect evidence of mistreatment. Their findings painted a grim picture of life for the Indian sailors on the high seas.

  Lascars were frequently starved on inferior rations and given summary beatings on board their ships. In some of the more extreme cases, lascars were punished by their superior officers by being ‘hung up with weights tied to their feet, flogged with a rope’.3 Devout Muslim lascars had been forced to eat pork even though it was strictly against their religion, and ‘the insult carried further by violently ramming the tail of the pig into their mouths and twisting the entrails of the pig around their necks’.4 The act was designed to cause greater suffering even than physical violence. Joseph Salter, a ‘Missionary to the Orientals and Africans’, became the chief collator of evidence and searched the London docks for lascars who had been subjected to such treatment. They were not that hard to find, and Salter diligently recorded what he saw. One lascar had most of his teeth knocked out after being whipped repeatedly in the face with a chain. Others were left crippled from bone-shattering beatings. One of the most gruesome stories in Salter’s files involved nine lascars who had been flogged to death by a ship’s captain. He had then ordered their bodies to be tossed over the side of the vessel.5 Writing in 1873, Salter said he found it almost impossible to believe that there were people who thought that ‘the coloured part of mankind existed only to be used like brute beasts, and to have the most insulting names language can supply heaped upon them’.6

  As terrible as their treatment on the ships could be, for many lascars the voyage to England was not the worst experience they suffered. As far back as 1782, complaints were reaching the East India Company of ships casting their lascars adrift in British
ports. In one letter to the president and council at Fort St George in Madras, headquarters of the East India Company, the London office complained that several lascars had found their way to their building in ‘great distress’. The office had therefore been forced to hand over money to the starving, homeless men, ‘from motives of compassion and humanity as well as policy’.7 However, humanity and policy only went so far. It was strenuously pointed out in the same letter that the expense incurred by any acts of charity ought not to be borne by them, and colleagues were actively discouraged from giving lascars the company addresses in the future.

  While the East India Company quibbled about responsibility, the lascars themselves were fighting to survive on the cold and inhospitable streets of London. As one editorial in the Morning Chronicle put it, the men had been: ‘Enticed, perhaps, from their native country where the climate is mild and tepid . . . brought to one more cold . . . without clothing proportional to conciliate them thereto . . . they are at present permitted to roam about this opulent city [London] unnoticed and unrelieved without a coat to shield them from the extremity of the weather, a shoe to preserve their feet from disaster, or even money to purchase sustenance sufficient to allay the gripping pangs of hunger.’8 There is no way of knowing how many died due to the cold and malnutrition.