Princess Bamba Sofia Sutherland. (Photos: Wikimedia Commons)
Princess Bamba Sofia Sutherland (1869-1957) was the eldest daughter of the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire. She was also the last surviving member of the Sikh royal family. The princess was named after her mother, Bamba, and her grandmother, Sophia.
He was born in London, as his father, Maharaja Duleep SinghHe was exiled from India and sent to England after the annexation of Punjab. He was only nine years old when he was forced to embrace Christianity.
Princess Bamba and her sisters came under the protection of Queen Victoria of England after the death of their father.
She went to study medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago in the United States of America, but had to drop out after three years when the school administration decided to ban women from studying at the medical school because of their gender. Princess Bamba decided to return to India and visit Lahore (present-day Pakistan), which was once the capital of the Sikh Empire.
She placed an advertisement in a newspaper inviting female candidates to accompany her to India.
A Hungarian lady, Marie Antoinette Gottesmann, accompanied her to India. Eventually, Maria married Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, a Sikh aristocrat.
In 1915, Princess Bamba married David Sutherland, an Indian Army doctor who later became Principal of King Edward Medical College in Lahore. She visited India frequently during the days of the British Raj and made several short trips to India, but was forced to stay in Lahore longer than she had intended in January 1941 as she was unable to secure return passage due to the war. In 1942, the tragic news of Princess Catherine’s death [her sister’s] “Death came. Princess Bamba was stranded; she could not be present at her sister’s last rites,” Duleepsingh.com says. Her house in Lahore was called ‘The Gulzar’.
She felt extremely lonely after the death of her husband and sister, Princess Sophie, in 1948.
Back in England, Princess Bamba began to style herself as the Queen of the Punjab. “She had her father’s rebellious nature and seemed the most aggrieved. Visiting a High Street bookshop in Norwich, she demanded that her chauffeur, George Davey, park in front of the shop, causing traffic. A policeman asked her, ‘Madam, please move your car,’ and she replied in her stern voice, ‘Do you know who you are talking to? I am the Queen of the Punjab.’ The ill-tempered princess would dress in her finest when visited by her fellow Sikhs in Blo Norton, who had begun to emigrate in the early 20th century. She would sit and soak up all the attention she could get from them,” says Duleepsingh.com.
Her maternal cousin Karl Wilhelm called her the “true heir of Ranjit Singh”. “She regarded Punjab and Kashmir as lost possessions of her family and was furious when the Pakistan-India border was drawn right through Punjab,” he said. She died dreaming of the lost glory of Punjab at the age of 89 in 1957. She was buried after a Christian funeral in Lahore. Due to tensions between India and Pakistan, no one from the Sikh community was allowed to attend her last rites.
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