THE first Sikh and Punjabi queen to live in Britain, Maharani Jind Kaur, died at Abingdon House, Kensington, in 1863, at the age of 46. She was the youngest wife of the Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the Lion of Punjab, who had once worn the Koh-i-Noor diamond. In 1849, her son, Maharaja Duleep Singh, as a child, had surrendered the diamond to Queen Victoria and converted to Christianity, becoming one of Victoria’s favourites.
After 13 years of separation, in imprisonment and exile, Jind Kaur was reunited with Duleep in India in April 1861, and sailed with him to England. Despite the Maharajah’s royal title and his favour at the British court, the two years between his mother’s arrival and her death in 1863 produced no proposals of marriage alliances with English or European aristocracy. For the first known Sikh-heritage marriage in a Christian ceremony, he was to look beyond England and Europe for a bride.
Jind Kaur was initially interred at the Dissenters’ Chapel, in Kensal Green Cemetery, before her body was returned to India for Sikh rites. Afterwards, her son consulted missionaries at the American Presbyterian Mission in Cairo before marrying Bamba Müller on 7 June 1864 — not in a church, but at the British Consulate in Alexandria. Bamba was the daughter of a German merchant and a formerly enslaved Ethiopian woman, Sophia, who were not married. Bamba became known as Maharani Bamba Duleep Singh, and bore Duleep three sons and three daughters.
His second marriage was to an English chambermaid, Ada Douglas Wetherill, from Lambeth. Their two daughters became the last-born Duleep Singhs — although, as an exhibition in Kensington Palace, “The Last Princesses of Punjab: Sophia Duleep Singh and the Women who Shaped Her”, explains, Queen Victoria did not support the second family as she did the first, because she did not recognise Ada’s daughters as legitimate heirs.
The exhibition marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Jind Kaur’s third granddaughter from her son’s first marriage: Princess Sophia Duleep Singh. A suffragette and wartime nurse, she was granted a grace-and-favour residence at Hampton Court Palace, where an English Heritage blue plaque now recognises her work for women’s rights. She was a goddaughter of Queen Victoria, and this is as much an Anglican story as a Sikh and Punjabi one.
A GOLD-framed portrait of Maharani Jind Kaur draws visitors into the exhibition. Painted by George Richmond in the year of her death, it is alive with the jewel tones of the Lahore court — deep blue, flashing emeralds, and crimson rubies threaded through silver and pearl.
Across the room, in a case devoted to Princess Sophia’s mother, sits the enamelled gold makara bracelet that Duleep Singh gave Bamba shortly after his mother’s death: the same deep blue along the outer band, the same crimson enamel scrolling around the field, the same emerald winding through the manes of the two facing creatures at the clasp.
Toor CollectionThe enamelled gold bangle owned by Maharani Bamba Duleep Singh is set with table-cut sapphires from Jaipur, India, and dates to c.1850
The bracelet had been Jind Kaur’s. Mothers passed such heirlooms to their daughters-in-law, and Duleep had performed the gesture on his mother’s behalf. A Sikh mother-in-law and a Christian daughter-in-law who never met are held together across two display cases in the same colours, across the threshold that the makaras were believed to guard. Images of the makara, an ancient mythological water creature, are carved into the gateways of South Asian temples. It is also an emblem of fertility and marriage. But the royal line was not to continue past the last-born Duleep Singh from the second marriage, Princess Irene, in 1889.
IN THE family tree, one last princess is absent: Princess Sophia’s only sister-in-law, Princess Victor Duleep Singh, wife of the eldest of Duleep and Bamba’s children, Prince Victor. It was she who challenged English aristocratic convention by marrying an Indian prince in an Anglican church.
It was in St Peter’s, Eaton Square, in London, on 4 January 1898, that Prince Victor married Lady Anne Blanche Alice Coventry, youngest daughter of the 9th Earl of Coventry in what the next day’s Daily Telegraph called “the first socially important wedding of the year”.
The Vicar, the Revd John Storrs, officiated. The hymn was John Keble’s “The voice that breathed o’er Eden”, and the address drew on a sermon by another Tractarian leader, Edward Pusey, on marriage, placing the ceremony firmly in the High Anglican tradition. Among the wedding gifts was a piece of silver inscribed: “To Prince Victor Duleep Singh on his marriage, from his godmother, Victoria, R.I., 1898.”
Lady Anne appeared in a Country Life frontispiece in August 1898, recognised after marriage as HH Princess Victor Duleep Singh. Thirteen years later, in January 1911, another frontispiece showed Princess Pauline Duleep Singh, her mother named by misake as “Lady Anne Duleep Singh”. A mixed-heritage princess of the right age had been assumed to be the daughter of the famous 1898 marriage.
The Women’s Library at LSEA Historic Royal Palaces conservator, Nelson Garcia, prepares a banner for display in the exhibition. It was used by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) in the early 20th century
The following week, Princess Sophia wrote in: “My half-sister, Pauline Duleep Singh, is the elder daughter of the late Maharajah Duleep Singh of Lahore by his second wife”: Lady Anne and Prince Victor never had children.
It has been suggested that Queen Victoria privately instructed Lady Anne never to have a child with Prince Victor, and to live abroad with him. The source is a single letter, dated January 2001, from an unnamed great-nephew of Lady Anne, recalling a conversation that, he says, he had with her in the 1950s. The letter is addressed to a private collector, Peter Bance.
Because the letter is in a private collection, it has not been independently assessed, and its full contents are unpublished. There is no record of the alleged instruction in Princess Victor’s or Queen Victoria’s own words, and no evidence that Prince Victor or his family knew of any such arrangement. Whether the marriage was childless by command, circumstance, or choice remains unclear.
Prince and Princess Victor rest together in Monaco under the inscription “My peace I give unto you.” The reference cited is John 19.27, although the words are from John 14.27. John 19.27 reads: “Behold, thy mother!” — a reference to motherhood, set into the stone of a threshold-crossing marriage that has since raised questions about motherhood and children. Whether by coincidence, error, or design, this quiet misalignment between inscription and citation has been there ever since.
PRINCE VICTOR died in Monte Carlo in 1918. Lady Anne lived on, widowed, for 38 more years, dying the year the foundation stone of Coventry Cathedral was laid.
The last surviving child of Duleep Singh, Prince Victor’s sister and Lady Anne’s sister-in-law, Princess Bamba, died the following year, and with her the Sikh royal line of Punjab came to its end. She is buried in a Christian cemetery in post-partition Lahore.
On New Year’s Day, as the current exhibition was being prepared, Coventry Cathedral hosted Langar Aid, a feeding humanity project by Khalsa Aid: the Sikh and Punjabi tradition of communal eating brought into a Christian space built on the hope of resurrection from ruins and reconciliation after conflict.
People of every race, background, and faith were welcomed to share their first meal of the new year beneath John Piper’s baptistery window, its golden yellows, blues, reds, and greens the same colours as glow in George Richmond’s portrait of Jind Kaur, and in the enamel of the makara bracelet that her son passed to his bride.
A chain of mothers and daughters-in-law who never met are held together across centuries by a painting, a makara bracelet, and a stained-glass window in the same vibrant colours: “My peace I give unto you” (John 14.27) and “Behold, thy mother!” (John 19.27).
Sundeep Braich is a heritage detective investigating the Duleep Singh family and the Koh-i-Noor diamond story. The exhibition at Kensington Palace, Kensington Gardens, London W8, runs until 8 November. hrp.org.uk