Standing at the gates of Hampton Court Palace in the early 20th century, a woman dressed in the height of Edwardian fashion, complete with a delicate, embroidered suffragette sash, engaged in an act of profound rebellion. This was not a typical protestor this was Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, the goddaughter of Queen Victoria, granddaughter of the ruler of the Sikh Empire, and a woman who had quietly dismantled her own identity as a royal ward to become a radical voice for the disenfranchised. A new exhibition opening this week at Kensington Palace, titled The Last Princesses of Punjab, peels back the velvet curtains of the British establishment to reveal the turbulent, revolutionary life of a woman who chose political agency over aristocratic privilege.

The exhibition, which opens on 26 March and runs through November, serves as more than a historical retrospective it is a critical re-examination of the mechanics of colonial power and the cost of imperial assimilation. For global audiences, and particularly for those in post-colonial nations like Kenya where the administrative and social scars of British rule remain etched into the landscape, the exhibition provides a necessary, painful mirror. It chronicles the forced migration of the Punjabi royal family, the stripping of their lands in 1849, and the subsequent psychological displacement of sisters who were groomed to be the perfect colonial subjects, only to become the empire’s most unexpected adversaries.

The Anatomy of Colonial Dispossession

The narrative arc of Sophia’s life begins with a cataclysmic theft. Her father, Duleep Singh, the final Maharajah of the Punjab, was coerced into surrendering his sovereign state and the fabled Koh-i-noor diamond to the East India Company at the tender age of ten. The diamond, which remains a potent and contentious symbol of colonial plunder, was eventually set into the crown of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. The trauma of this dispossession was not merely financial it was existential. The Duleep Singh children were raised at Elveden Hall in Suffolk, effectively severed from their Punjabi heritage while being paraded as evidence of the benevolence of the British crown.

Historians argue that Sophia’s eventual turn toward the suffragette movement was a rejection of the paternalistic guardianship she had been forced to endure. Her participation in the Women’s Tax Resistance League was not merely about voting rights it was a philosophical statement. By refusing to pay taxes—an act for which she was summoned to court three times—she was challenging the legitimacy of a government that demanded her financial contribution while denying her the fundamental rights of a citizen. This resistance was a direct confrontation with the systemic hypocrisy of the Edwardian era, where the same establishment that dined with her also systematically marginalized her people.

The Architecture of Resistance

The exhibition brings together a cache of artifacts that serve as tactile evidence of this resistance. Among the highlights is a bound volume of The Suffragette, featuring an image of Sophia selling the newspaper to passersby—an undignified occupation for a princess, but a powerful badge of honor for a militant activist. Her correspondence reveals a woman of sharp intellect and unwavering resolve, particularly her handwritten letter to Winston Churchill, then a powerful political figure, in which she cataloged the police brutality witnessed during the Black Friday protests of 1910.

• Key Artifacts and Historical Timeline:
• 1849: The formal annexation of the Punjab by the East India Company and the surrender of the Koh-i-noor.
• 1910: Sophia marches alongside Emmeline Pankhurst at the Black Friday suffragette demonstrations.
• 1911: Active participation in the Women’s Tax Resistance League, with the motto "No Vote, No Tax."
• 1939-1945: Sister Catherine Duleep Singh’s intervention for Jewish refugees, including the gift of an heirloom pendant to Ursula Hornstein.
• 2026: The opening of The Last Princesses of Punjab exhibition at Kensington Palace.

The exhibition also sheds light on the lesser-known contributions of Sophia’s sister, Catherine. While Sophia was the firebrand, Catherine operated with a quiet, persistent humanitarianism. During the rise of Nazi Germany, Catherine acted as a guarantor for Jewish families fleeing persecution, inviting them to take refuge in her Buckinghamshire home. The inclusion of a jewelled pendant, an heirloom from their grandmother Jind Kaur that Catherine bestowed upon an eight-year-old refugee named Ursula Hornstein, acts as a poignant reminder of the enduring legacy of dispossession. In giving away an object of immense symbolic and monetary value, Catherine was reclaiming the agency of her heritage to protect those currently being marginalized by another brutal regime.

A Mirror for the Modern World

For readers in Nairobi and beyond, the story of the Duleep Singh sisters is not a distant European fairy tale. It is a shared history of colonial imposition. The British Raj’s administrative reach was global the same mechanisms that dispossessed the Punjab were later employed, in various forms, to restructure the economies and social hierarchies of East Africa. The displacement of indigenous populations in Kenya to make way for settler agriculture, for example, shares a grim DNA with the annexation of the Punjab. The exhibition forces a modern audience to confront the question of restitution—not just of stolen artifacts like the Koh-i-noor, but of the dignity that was stripped from the colonized.

Furthermore, the contemporary responses from British South Asian women integrated into the exhibition bridge the gap between the past and the present. It highlights the evolution of the South Asian diaspora—from being viewed as exotic royal curiosities or colonial laborers to becoming integral, critical voices in the discourse of human rights and social justice. The rocking horse and the three-piece embroidered outfits displayed at Kensington Palace, which seem like quaint relics of childhood, become heavy with subtext when viewed through the lens of a princess who was forced to reconcile the opulent, suffocating reality of her British upbringing with the raw, painful memory of her family’s lost kingdom.

As the doors open at Kensington Palace, the exhibition asks the public to move beyond the superficial glamour of the "Punjabi princess" moniker. It invites an uncomfortable but necessary reckoning with the cost of empire and the resilience of those who, having been robbed of their sovereignty, fought for a world where their voices might finally be heard. The legacy of Sophia Duleep Singh remains a testament to the fact that power, no matter how entrenched, is never absolute in the face of persistent, principled resistance.