Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary

by Anand, Anita

  Gokhale asked his followers to be patient and steadfast, employing only non-violent means to make their feelings heard. Such was the growing anti-British feeling at the turn of the century that those who could not personally hear him speak pored over his words in articles appearing in the indigenous press. Gokhale’s speeches were transcribed and translated with ferocious zeal, and his essays reproduced and disseminated all over India and beyond. Among those who came into contact with Gokhale through his writing was an unknown Gujarati lawyer who had emigrated to South Africa fourteen years before. Slight of build, with prominent ears which would one day support unmistakable round wire spectacles, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was mesmerised by the political pamphlets coming from Gokhale’s pen.1 In 1907 Gandhi found himself battling against South Africa’s toughening race laws and when it came to colonial resistance, the Indian National Congress was his only template. (The South African Native National Congress – precursor to the ANC – would only come into existence five years later.)

  Gokhale’s non-violent message appealed to Gandhi’s own sensibilities and he was working up the courage to invite his distant mentor to visit him in Durban. Watching with fascination, he waited to see what would happen in faraway Punjab as the Indian nationalist movement flexed its muscles.

  In Lahore, on the evening of 16 February, the streets bubbled with civil unrest. After the initial lawlessness of the day, some of which had been witnessed by Sophia and her sister, by sunset the British had finally contained the worst of the violence by a show of brute force. News of Gokhale’s imminent arrival spread rapidly through Lahore, causing the local administration to convulse with trepidation. Like most of those around them, Sophia and her sister were desperate to hear Gokhale speak. His arrival that night heralded a carnival atmosphere as students greeted him with noisy joy, unhitching the horses, and pulling his carriage through the streets with their own bodies.2 Gokhale was due to deliver his first Lahore lecture the very next day.

  All lessons at the university were cancelled as young men poured into Lahore’s main lecture theatre to await Gokhale’s latest sermon. When the two Duleep Singh princesses arrived they were ushered into the seats reserved for special guests, beside the speaker’s lectern. To Sophia’s dismay, she and her sister were left facing a packed and boisterous house. As she wrote in her diary that night: ‘We were stuck up on the stage and clapping ensued, oh horrors – we knew we were going to have reserved seats and feared this, but the clapping was awful!! However of course it was nice of them to put us up there.’3

  When Gokhale slowly shuffled up the steps to take his position before the audience, the sound of cheering and clapping was deafening. Sophia was carried along by the excitement, and clapped with all her might. Then Gokhale turned to where she and Bamba sat, and asked the audience to rise in respect for the granddaughters of the great Maharajah Ranjit Singh. The wave of sound that hit her was like nothing Sophia had experienced before. Such public displays were precisely the type of rabble-rousing the Duleep Singhs had so frequently been warned against. She was left filled with a mixture of dread, embarrassment and intense gratitude.

  Sophia described Gokhale’s speech as: ‘Such an excellent one, full of sense . . . a very wise man.’4 Gokhale spoke at length about the tensions in the country, and of his belief that only by granting a degree of Indian self-governance could that tension be dissipated. Sophia noticed that the hall was packed with thousands of people.5 Those Indians who had made it into the auditorium absorbed every word, often rising in noisy ovation: ‘Every now and then there was a great [clamour] of people and it was quite difficult to get them all to sit down again.’6 Hundreds of young Indians had failed to get inside the overspilling hall, and were left standing on the pavement outside, having the words relayed to them in a series of Chinese whispers.

  After the lecture, Sophia and Bamba left the theatre with cheers ringing in their ears, but not before they had enjoyed a brief personal audience with Gokhale. Sophia did not note in her diary what he said to them, but it was significant enough to convince both her and Bamba to attend a second lecture, due to be delivered the next day. That night, however, all talk of Gokhale in Lahore was eclipsed by another rumour. It was being whispered throughout the city that Lala Lajpat Rai, a militant nationalist detested by the British, would also be taking to the stage. If Gokhale was a spark that could ignite the powder keg of Punjab, Lala Lajpat Rai was the grenade.

  Born just one year earlier than Gokhale in the rural belt of Punjab, at forty-five, Lala Lajpat Rai looked considerably older. Without the chubby, smooth face of his fellow nationalist, Rai appeared careworn and frayed. His thick thatch of hair was whitening prematurely, as was his full, bushy moustache. His peers referred to him as Lala-ji, an honorific used in Punjab by children for their fathers. Among the general public, Lajpat Rai was known as ‘Punjab Kesari’, or ‘Lion of Punjab’ – a moniker familiar to Sophia, for her grandfather, Maharajah Ranjit Singh, had been given the same title many years before.

  Lajpat Rai, like Gokhale, had been a bright young boy with a thirst for education. His father was an Urdu teacher at a government school, and therefore earned very little. Despite the family’s relative poverty, Rai proved to be a natural scholar who, like Gokhale, spent much time self-educating. Eventually gaining entry to Lahore’s government college to study law, he came into contact with the Arya Samaj, a highly politicised Hindu sect. The Samaj believed in the authority of the Vedas, the most ancient scripture of the Hindus, and had a strong ethos of social duty. Followers were expected to work for the poor as a mark of their devotion to God. As a result, Lala Lajpat Rai came face to face with terrible suffering during the famines of 1896 and 1900. He travelled around the regions hit by the highest death tolls. With a gift for organisation, Lajpat Rai marshalled young volunteers to distribute food and water, and made provision for the disposal of bodies. He also found homes for the orphans left behind, and is personally credited with rehousing almost 250 children in Lahore.

  When the devastating Kangra earthquake of 1905 occurred, Lajpat Rai left immediately for the hills, scene of the worst devastation.7 There he worked to the point of exhaustion, pulling the dead and injured from the rubble with his own hands. The experience left him angry and bitter. He accused the British of wilful neglect, insisting survivors had been left to fend for themselves without the means to do so. With all his time taken up by disaster relief, Lajpat Rai abandoned his fledgling legal practice, and resolved to give his life to politics and Indian nationalism.

  Like Gokhale, Lajpat Rai swiftly became one of the leading figures in the INC. Unlike Gokhale, he had a natural gift for oratory and soon became known as the party’s voice. He told packed audiences that food inflation, high taxes and the import of British goods had crippled the prospects of ordinary Indians for generations to come. Lajpat Rai’s speeches were impassioned, simple and often delivered in the audience’s native dialect. Time and again he asked why their country, so rich in natural resources, was being forced into poverty. Others within the INC were also losing patience with Gokhale’s non-confrontational approach. They begged Lajpat Rai to seize the party’s leadership and to take the INC towards a more militant agenda. He refused, believing any internal war within the INC would only weaken it, but his relationship with Gokhale became strained, especially when he saw how the British were prepared to carve up his country.

  Back in October 1905, the Viceroy Lord Curzon had decided to partition Bengal, scene of the colony’s most active Indian nationalism. The predominantly Muslim eastern part of the province was split from the largely Hindu west, and both sides were swallowed by separate, larger administrations. Curzon’s partition immediately created a template for sectarian division and violence. Lajpat Rai believed the British were deliberately manufacturing flashpoints in an attempt to divert the growing calls for autonomy. He and a small cadre within the INC declared that Britain’s policy of ‘divide and rule’ would wreck the country for ever. They began to openly
question Gokhale’s pacifist approach. Once again, the radicals begged Lajpat Rai to lead a rebel group and once again Lajpat Rai refused. Instead, a triumvirate within the INC, including Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a lawyer from Maharashtra, and Bipin Chandra Pal, a teacher from Bengal, began to formulate militant strategies of resistance from within, much to Gokhale’s disapproval.

  Known as the ‘Lal-Bal-Pal’ trio, the three encouraged lockouts in British-owned factories, and called on Indians to burn the vast number of clothes being imported from England. For years, Indian farmers had been pushed to grow cotton. Their crops were then bought by British companies at forcibly depressed prices and exported to Britain where in places such as Manchester, the buds were turned to cloth and exported back to India.

  The Lal-Bal-Pal message was simple. India grows the cotton, India can manufacture the cloth, and Indians will keep the money. Their strikes and smoky picket lines were met with overwhelming force. Lajpat Rai also urged an extension of the clothing boycott to include all goods manufactured in Britain. He argued that if the Raj could not export and sell products to India, its largest market, they could ill afford to maintain troops and civil administration in the colony. Dubbed the ‘Swadeshi’ or ‘Self-sufficiency Movement’, nationalists began to follow in ever greater numbers, hoping to put money and power back into the hands of Indians. Lajpat Rai’s call to action appealed to young idealists but it frightened many of the educated, older aristocrats in Sophia’s circle.

  The schism within the Indian National Congress had by now become bitterly acrimonious. Predictably, the chance to see two nationalist rivals on the same stage attracted even bigger crowds. On the second night, 17 February, the police came out in great numbers taking positions in tight lines outside the university’s main auditorium. Many of them were mounted and most of them were armed.

  Sophia and her sister squeezed through a gauntlet of British police to enter the hall. As they did, they were ushered onto the stage again; however, this time, knowing what to expect, Sophia objected, desperately. The organisers would hear none of it, and she and Bamba had no choice but to resume their places of honour alongside the two empty chairs reserved for Gokhale and Lajpat Rai: ‘Up we got amid cheers . . . Oh dear we were cockatoos with a vengeance today.’8

  Gokhale spoke with his customary measured tones, but Sophia and the others were taut with anticipation waiting for his fellow speaker. When Lala Lajpat Rai rose, the crowds inside and outside the auditorium erupted. Sophia, who had been so impressed by Gokhale, was entranced by Lajpat Rai. She described his speech as ‘beautiful’,9 as he passionately lamented the fate of his country, rich in natural resources but artificially kept poor by the economic policy of the British. He begged the audience to embrace Swadeshi, telling them that only the total boycott of British goods could revive indigenous manufacturing. As Sophia wrote later in her diary: ‘He pointed out how so little land is now cultivated,’10 comparing it to the days of the Sikh Kingdom, when farms covered Punjab and everyone had enough to eat. He spoke of how ‘all the raw material is exported – finished . . . he said that students should work for the common good – go with the villagers to preach union’.11

  That day, Lala Lajpat Rai became Sophia’s hero: ‘He is a wonderful speaker. A noble unselfish man.’12 The speech caused such commotion both inside and out that the police threatened to break up the event by force unless things calmed down. In the midst of the mounting hysteria, the man they called ‘Punjab Kesari’ turned to face Sophia and Bamba. Addressing the sisters with great deference, he thanked them on behalf of Gokhale and himself, ‘for the honour we had done them in coming. I turned crimson,’ wrote Sophia, ‘and did not know where to look. Then the clapping was too much. He went on to mention us further, Granddaughters of the Lion of the Punjab etc. etc.’13

  The surge in sound tested the patience of the armed police outside and scuffles broke out between them and students who had not been able to fit in the hall. The organisers had to beg the British commanding officers to let the women out safely before things got too violent. Sophia and Bamba were rushed to a waiting tonga, and the horses sped them away. As Sophia looked back on the crowds closing in behind her she thought: ‘Which are friends and which are foes in this country?’14

  A couple of days later Lala Lajpat Rai and Gokhale put their political differences aside and made a rare and unexpected joint visit to The Palms. The new Lion of Punjab was particularly keen to meet the progeny of his namesake. Not wishing to attract unwanted police attention, the pair told nobody of their visit, not even the princesses themselves. As a result, Sophia and Bamba were completely unprepared. The house was a mess, the sisters were not dressed for company and the servants were thrown into a whirl of confusion as the two men entered the front door. Seeing her hero again, Sophia acted like a dumbstruck teenager. She stammered with embarrassment, unable to answer the visitors’ polite questions: ‘I never knew anything so awkward . . . the room was fearfully untidy and I was so shy I could not utter a sound. B did not say much and they soon went. I felt the whole thing had been too awkward for words.’15

  In the weeks that followed, Sophia pored over the nationalist arguments as unrest in Lahore gathered momentum. Lala Lajpat Rai took his agitation to every corner of the city and beyond. The Raj’s Colonisation Bill had been passed the year before and it was causing enormous unrest in the countryside. Under the new law, any farmer who died without a blood heir would have all his fields and property sold to the highest bidder and proceeds would go to the British. Since agricultural villages often operated like extended families where acreage and wealth passed between farmers even when there was no blood tie, the new law was seen as an affront to the Punjabi way of life. Coupled with increasing taxation and bad harvests, rural Punjab had become a tinderbox. Lala Lajpat Rai encouraged farmers to take whatever measures were necessary to resist the unjust laws and taxes. It would not be long before the British moved against the princess’s new role model.

  Leaving the seething political landscape of Lahore behind them for a while, the princesses set out once again to visit their grandfather’s dominion. Very soon it became clear that their new nationalist friendships had earned them even more unwelcome attention. Sophia had first noticed they were being followed when she and Bamba were waiting for a train. Two English officers tailed them closely and conspicuously: ‘It was the greatest cheek imaginable – followed us right up and sat beside us on the platform. How they dared!!’16 Despite the uninvited entourage, the sisters carried on with their plans. One of their first stops was the princely state of Kapurthala, home of Rajah Harnam Singh, the man they no longer trusted.

  His nephew, Maharajah Jagatjit Singh, welcomed them to Kapurthala. A portly man of thirty-five, he greeted them with the latest of his four wives, Maharani Kanari, and invited them to a banquet he was throwing in their honour. Despite his hospitality, during the meal Sophia found that she was growing to dislike Jagatjit Singh intensely. Chiefly, it was his politics that offended her: ‘This Raja is very over privileged and loves Europe, especially France. He does not seem to care much for his own country or people!!!’17 Sophia’s opinion of the Maharajah fell further when she learned of his infidelity. ‘He has an English woman,’18 she noted tersely in her diary.

  Sophia was right about the affair, but wrong about the mistress’s nationality. A Spanish flamenco dancer named Anita Delgado had won the Maharajah’s heart and would be the next Maharani of Kapurthala. The Maharajah was hastening the construction of a new palace for her. Designed by a French architect, the magnificent and highly ornate structure would bring a piece of Paris to the Punjab. Sophia found the style and lascivious inspiration behind the building entirely distasteful. Hoping for the worst, she wondered ‘whether it will resist an earthquake or not it will be interesting to know’.19 Anita Delgado would rock the foundations of Jagatjit’s world, and cheat on him enthusiastically throughout their marriage.20

  Sophia was keen to leave the kingdom of Kapurt
hala far behind her; her low opinion of the Maharajah had made it a stressful excursion. On arrival in the city of Jalandhar, the sisters were invited to a garden party by one of the most important British officials in the city. It was the kind of social occasion Sophia had formerly loved, with music, genteel company and the chance to show off her latest dress; however, the event clashed with a nationalist meeting at which Lajpat Rai was slated to appear, and Sophia was desperate to hear him again. Bamba took so long to get ready that they missed their chance, leaving them free to attend the garden party after all.21 Sophia hated every minute of it: ‘We were the only Indians in the place . . . there were the usual English people, we were taken in and sat down inside and some of the English were brought up and introduced to us. It was killing . . . they were so shy and did not know in the least what to say and we did not help them.’22 Whether it was because of Bamba’s constant anti-British invective, or her own hero-worship of Lajpat Rai, Sophia was changing – but not fast enough for Bamba.

  The next day, the sisters took tea with some Indian friends, a Sikh lady called Sardarni Balwant Singh, another called Sardarni Atari Singh and a Bengali lady called Mrs Chatterjee. The subject of the English came up and Sophia and Bamba found themselves disagreeing about the very issue that had united them only twenty-four hours before: ‘. . . there was a great discussion about English people as to whether or not they could be friends of foreigners including Indians of course’.23 Sophia argued that it was wrong to tar an entire people because of the misdeeds of a few: ‘I say I have a few [English] friends and know I have but B says that can’t be.’24 The two Sikh ladies agreed wholeheartedly with Bamba. Only Mrs Chatterjee would concede weakly, ‘there are some nice ones’.25 Despite being outnumbered Sophia refused to change her opinion and instead the topic changed course awkwardly to Lala Lajpat Rai’s latest speech. The next day Sophia and Bamba would be too busy to take up where they left off, for they were embarking on the next leg of their tour which would take them to Ferozepur, Jalalabad and Mamdot.