Sophia

Anita Anand

Bloomsbury India

432 pages, Rs. 599

Sophia Duleep Singh was the daughter of Maharaja Duleep Singh, the heir to the Sikh kingdom. In 1859, the British exiled the Maharaja to England. Sophia, as a god-daughter of Queen Victoria, was raised as a genteel, aristocratic English woman, but became a revolutionary. Her causes were the struggle for Indian independence, the fate of the Asian lascars employed on European ships, the welfare of Indian soldiers in the First World War—and, above all, the fight for female suffrage.