Her mother died when she was 11, and her father had long since abandoned the family to marry a girl he’d met when she was a chambermaid at a famously “discreet” London hotel - leaving Sophia and her older brothers and sisters to the mercy of Queen Victoria and her ministers. In the second of the book’s three parts, Duleep’s youngest daughter, Sophia, starts to come into her own as a character. Visited Victoria’s court as a teenager, and there he became a pet of the monarch and friends with the dissolute Prince of Wales, the queen’s eldest son, who spent almost his entire life looking for ways to distract himself from his main job of waiting for his mother to die. Despite the rich trappings, it was a humiliating role. Unlike his father, Duleep Singh never had a chance to fight for his ancestral land, and instead spent his life fighting its rulers for recognition and recompense. His is a sad story of displacement and dependency that anticipates the fate of his children. He was banished from his homeland and placed in the care of Scottish guardians in India, to begin the process of becoming an English gentleman, a Christian and a loyal subject of the crown. After two Anglo-Sikh wars and the imprisonment of his mother, the boy King Duleep signed over his lands to the British. To the watching, waiting agents of the British East India Company, who had been trading in India for two centuries and were keen to establish dominance over independent Punjab, it seemed that control of the now-chaotic region might soon be within their grasp.

Sophia by anita anand