anita anand sophia princess suffragette revolutionary

His incredible extravagance and the thrifty accounting of the government, especially as the latter realised the political insignificance of the deposed king, led to a financial crisis, which, in turn, fired in him a fierce indignation at having lost his kingdom. Yet Duleep’s assimilation did not last long. There, patronised by Victoria and with a pension from the government, he was set up for the most part to live the life of an English aristocrat in Elveden, Suffolk. In return, after four years of an English education and conversion to Christianity, he was dispatched to England. Ranjit Singh died in 1839, and it was his 11-year-old heir, Duleep Singh, who was forced to sign away the Punjab to the British. In between, in 1848, came the annexation of the Punjab, a northern kingdom that, under the Sikh leader Ranjit Singh, had expanded into contemporary Afghanistan and Kashmir. A hundred years before that, victory in the battle of Plassey had been an o ccasion to end the reign of Siraj-ud Daulah in Bengal.

The uprising of 1857, what mainstream British historians call the “mutiny”, resulted in the termination of the rule of the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar.

T he British, Marx wrote in his dispatches on the Indian uprising of 1857, could be as revolutionary abroad as they were conservative at home, happy to topple foreign monarchs as long as it suited their own political and commercial interests.

Anita anand sophia princess suffragette revolutionary