Sophia Duleep Singh

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2018: Royal Mail honours her with stamp

Simrat Ghuman, UK honour for Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s granddaughter, February 7, 2018: The Times of India

Princess Sophia’s photo has been used for a stamp to commemorate her role in getting equal voting rights for women
From: Simrat Ghuman, UK honour for Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s granddaughter, February 7, 2018: The Times of India

Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s granddaughter, Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, has been honoured with a Royal Mail stamp for her rights activism. A photograph showing Sophia, daughter of Bamba Mueller and maharaja Duleep Singh, the last ruler of the Sikh empire, selling copies of the Suffragette newspaper in 1913 outside Hampton Court Palace has been used for a stamp to commemorate this heroine of the British movement to get equal voting rights for women.

The £1.57 stamp is one of eight issued by Royal Mail on Tuesday to “mark the centenary of the Representation of the People Act (in the UK) where for the first time women won the right to vote in parliamentary elections”. The stamps will be released for public use on February 15. This is the first time a person of Sikh background has been featured on a Royal Mail stamp.

Sophia was the youngest of maharaja Duleep Singh’s five surviving children. Born in the UK in 1876 during her father’s lifelong exile, she had Queen Victoria for godmother, and was brought up as “a thoroughly anglicised aristocrat”, till she swapped English high society for the Suffragettes, much to the consternation of the royal family and the British government of the day.

Sophia’s journey from the toast of fashionable parties to a revolutionary was wrought over many years Her admiration for Lala Lajpat Rai, and his death after being lathicharged by the British played a significant role in her volte-face.