| Princess Bamba Duleep Singh | |
| Princess of Punjab | |
| Full Name: | Bamba Sofiá Jindan |
| Spouse: | David Waters Sutherland |
| Father: | Duleep Singh |
| Mother: | Bamba Müller |
| Birth Name: | Bamba Sofia Jindan Duleep Singh |
| Birth Date: | 29 September 1869 |
| Birth Place: | London, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland |
| Death Place: | Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan |
| Place Of Burial: | Christian Cemetery, Gulbarg, Lahore |
Princess Bamba Sutherland (29 September 1869 – 10 March 1957) was a member of the royal family that ruled the Sikh Empire in the Punjab. After a childhood in England, she settled in Lahore, the capital of what had been her father's kingdom, where she was a suffragette and a passionate advocate of self rule and independence of India. She was a close and personal friend of Indian revolutionaries whom she hosted at her house in Lahore like Lala Lajpat Rai.
Born as Bamba Sofia Jindan Duleep Singh, she was the eldest daughter of Maharaja Duleep Singh and his Abyssinian German (Ethiopian Jew) first wife Bamba Müller (Maharani Bamba). Princess Bamba was born on 29 September 1869, in London. Her father was a great favorite and godchild of Queen Victoria of England and her son King Edward who protected Bamba and her siblings after the untimely demise of her father (the ruler of the Punjab) who had been brought to Britain as a child under the care of the East India Company, after the Punjab invasion of the Second Anglo-Sikh War and the subsequent annexation of the Punjab on 29 March 1849.[1]
Bamba's father, Duleep Singh, was forcibly separated from his mother the Queen Regent Jind Kaur, who subsequently miraculously escaped a British prison in India for Nepal where she suffered in isolation and did her best to reach her son by letter. Duleep was brought up in England and forcibly converted to Christianity at the age of 9. Eventually, at Duleep's request, the British allowed Jind Kaur to join her son in England when he was a young man. She died in England when Duleep was still a young adult.
Duleep was allowed by the British to visit India to bury his mother's ashes after she died in Britain, although the body had to remain at Kensal Green Cemetery for nearly a year while his family and he made a case to inter her ashes with her husband. His mother's ashes were not allowed to be buried in Lahore but had to be placed in a memorial in Bombay, going against her last wishes and those of her people as a final blow to the Punjabi and Sikh pride. Queen Jindan was the last regnant of the Sikh crown till the British invaded by way of manipulation and intrigue with the viziers of the crown the Dogras who had been gifted Kashmir by Maharaja Ranjit Singh, an act of betrayal which led to the colonization of the entire subcontinent to British rule and the impoverishing of India where over $2 trillion was removed from the country for English coffers.[2]
On Duleep's journey back to England after returning his mother's remains to India, he met and then married Bamba Müller, who was working at a missionary school in Cairo. Bamba Müller was raised in Cairo, and was the daughter of Ludwig Müller, a German merchant banker of Todd Müller and Company, and Sofia, his Jewish wife, who was of Abyssinian (Ethiopian) descent. The English authority which ruled over the area did not recognize Jewish marriages. Duleep brought Bamba back to England as his wife as he was deeply impressed by her piety, beauty and reserve. His marriage came after Queen Victoria had unsuccessfully tried to persuade him to marry a Christian convert from a royal South Indian family who had been similarly kidnapped and after Queen Victoria had demeaned her son the future King Edward for not following her Victorian ways of purity. King Duleep and King Edward were best friends, experiencing all the firsts of life together from marriage to the birth of their children. Bamba was a great favorite of King Edward who was a frequent visitor to their home Elveden Hall.
Princess Bamba was their first daughter and was named after her mother, her maternal grandmother, and her paternal grandmother.[3] The name "Bamba" means pink in Arabic.[4]
Bamba lived at Elveden Hall until her mother and her siblings were moved to London by Crown Authorities after her father escaped to Paris. Her mother died from kidney failure in 1887 in London while Bamba raised her siblings in a cold, darkened house with a few meager personal effects she and her siblings saved during the move from Elveden. Her father Duleep died in 1893 in Paris of a heart attack while trying to round up troops to get back his kingdom. She and the rest of her brothers and sisters were placed by King Edward who had pangs of conscience at the Crown Authority killing his friend so placed the children in the care of Arthur Oliphant, whose father, Lt Col. James Oliphant, was her Duleep's loyal equerry and trusted friend who pledged himself to their care and education.[5] Oliphant arranged the education of the children and she completed her schooling until she went to Somerville College at Oxford. She went to the United States for medical school at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois where she completed 3 years of schooling with distinction till the school administration decided that women could no longer study medical education due to their gender. Bamba opted to return to Lahore.[6]
When Bamba decided to move to India, she hired a companion. The lady selected was Hungarian Jew, Marie Antoinette Gottesmann, whose father was an Austro-Hungarian government official from the Jewish upper class circles of Budapest. The two made a number of visits to India, settling in Lahore and in the hill station of Shimla to live just as her ancestors did for centuries. Lahore was the winter capital, while Simla was the summer capital alongside Kashmir. Marie Antoinette met and married Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, a Sikh aristocrat closely related to her grandmother's family, and they went to live in Hungary till they were pushed out by the Bolshevik Revolution and opted to return to India. Amrita Sher-Gil, a notable painter, was their daughter and god daughter of Bamba.[3] Bamba settled alone in Lahore, and in 1915, married the Principal of King Edward Medical College in Lahore, David Waters Sutherland.[3]
In 1924, permission was finally given by the English Crown for Bamba's grandmother's ashes to be interred in Lahore. Her grandmother Maharani Jindan had died in 1863 in Kensington but the funerary rites were denied at the time. Bamba supervised the transfer of ashes from Bombay to Lahore where they had been placed when her father had once visited India briefly. It is a great Sikh taboo to not perform rites or cremation, just like Jewish roots of Bamba's maternal grandmother.[2] Finally, Princess Bamba deposited the ashes in the memorial to Maharaja Ranjit Singh, her grandfather, in Lahore.
Sutherland was widowed in Lahore when her husband died in 1939. Dr. Sutherland was the principal of the medical college of Lahore. He had moved to Scotland many years previously, but she refused to, citing her love of her home country and her hope for their independence. She was an incredible hostess, bringing many revolutionaries that established India's independence. The home she lived in was affectionately called Gulzar (Rose Palace) and had a garden of exclusive rose varieties she cultivated herself. Her will specified that red roses be placed on her grave from time to time. She has many living relatives who were related to Maharaja Ranjit Singh who lived in what is now Punjab, India. Her family's descendants through Maharaja Ranjit Singh, including the court administrators, still own land in Amritsar, India, where her grandfather had added all the gold to the Golden Temple, Harmandir Sahib. When she finally died, her equerry and her funeral were arranged by the United Kingdom Deputy High Commissioner in Lahore, as well as a few friends as most of her comrades and companions and relatives had escaped to India during partition. She refused to leave her home and Lahore, the capital of the Sikhs, as she could not part with their kingdom.[3]
Sutherland died on 10 March 1957, in Lahore, surrounded by friends. She refused to leave Lahore despite partition as she didn't agree with the division of the country into India and Pakistan. She has many relatives in Punjab and the Jatt Sikh aristocracy remembers her fight for an independent India with great love. She was a revolutionary, a suffragette, and beloved to the Sikh community.
Bamba left a large quantity of important historical items to her secretary, Pir Karim Bakhsh Supra of Lahore, who gave them to the Pakistani government to be put on display publicly. Many items are in disrepair and kept in a collection that must be granted permission to be seen. The collection consists of eighteen paintings, fourteen watercolours, 22 paintings on ivory, and a number of photos and other articles. The collection was sold to the Pakistani government, and it is kept in Lahore Fort. It is known as the Princess Bamba Collection.[7]
The Persian distich on her gravestone has been translated as:
The difference between royalty and servility vanishes,
The moment the writing of destiny is encountered,
If one opens the grave,
None would be able to discern rich from poor.