Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary

by Anand, Anita

  The Lord Chamberlain, Earl Spencer the Viscount of Althorpe, would ordinarily have granted Sophia’s wish without question. However he must have heard something disconcerting, a rumour serious enough to warrant further inquiry. It fell to Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie of the India Office to respond to the Lord Chamberlain’s letter. As aide-de-camp to the Secretary of State, he had access to all the relevant classified files on the Duleep Singh princesses. Sophia may have left Indian politics behind, but her brief dalliance had followed her.

  Curzon Wyllie and his colleague, William Lee Warner, at the Political and Secret Department, were the repositories of all surveillance that took place on behalf of the Indian government. This made them detested by Indians: the pair were described by one native publication as, ‘Old unrepentant foes of India who have fattened on the misery of the Indian peasant every [day] since they began their career’.19

  Despite his reputation, and her past associations, Curzon Wyllie did not deem Sophia to be a particular threat:

  Sir in reference to your letter of the 20th instant I am directed to state for the information of the Lord Great Chamberlain that the Princesses Catherine and Sophia Duleep Singh are the daughters of the late highness the Maharajah Duleep Singh, GCSI of the Punjab, and sisters of Prince Victor Duleep Singh . . . They are received at Court as Princess Catherine and Princess Sophia Duleep Singh . . . They have no recognised status in India and are to all intents and purposes British Crown subjects. Their present request to the Lord Great Chamberlain would appear deserving of favourable consideration.20

  In an additional note, pinned to the same file, Curzon Wyllie added greater detail both about Sophia’s family history and her recent trip to India. Negative reports seemed to have been associated only with Bamba. Sophia’s elder sister was regarded as the corrupting influence in her life. The criticism was not entirely without foundation. Bamba had always ruled over her little sister, and it had been she who had led Sophia into the cause of Indian nationalism. However, the suffragette movement was something all of her own.

  Sophia’s local branch of the WSPU was situated in Kingston-upon-Thames, just a few miles away from Hampton Court. Although it stood at the heart of affluent and leafy suburbia, Kingston, together with neighbouring Richmond, made up two of the most active hotbeds of militant suffragette activity in the country. In 1909, Sophia’s local WSPU leader was a striking young Irish woman called Norah Dacre Fox.21 With her detonative personality, Norah bore more than a passing resemblance to Christabel Pankhurst. Like her leader, she could pass for a much younger woman, and often chose to exploit the fact, wearing her flyaway blonde hair in girlish coils on either side of her head. The image did not fit the message, because sweet-faced Norah believed suffragettes should use any means necessary to achieve their aims. Vandalism and arson were acceptable strategies in her opinion. In the course of her life, she would go to prison three times for acting on those beliefs.22 Not since Sophia sat in a room with the revolutionary Sarla Devi in Lahore had she been in the company of such a dangerous woman.

  As well as her devotion to the WSPU, Dacre Fox was also an ardent anti-vivisectionist, which could only have endeared her more to the animal-loving princess. Soon Sophia was devoting all her time to the cause. At first she turned her attention to the movement’s finances, throwing herself into fundraising. She helped organise bazaars and the suffragettes gleefully advertised jams and cakes ‘made by the Princess herself’, although it was highly unlikely that Sophia even knew how to light an oven let alone how to bake a cake.

  Not satisfied with raising funds for the effort, Sophia asked if she could do more. Only too happy to give her the chance, the suffragettes asked the princess to appear at numerous suffragette ‘At Homes’ – afternoons of parlour politics where women were recruited or pressed for money in genteel surroundings. Sophia’s celebrity proved to be very useful as many women came as much to see an Indian princess as to hear about the suffragettes. In no time, Sophia’s efforts came to the attention of the WSPU leadership. Intrigued, Emmeline Pankhurst asked to meet her and quickly Sophia gained access to the inner circle of the union. Her status and close history with Queen Victoria’s family made her newsworthy and the Pankhursts began to think of ways to utilise their royal rebel. Sophia awaited their instructions, anxious to be of service. The princess’s new group of friends included Emmeline Pethick Lawrence, Ethel Smyth and Annie Kenny. Together they were the most vilified women in England, and Sophia delighted in their company.

  She was not the only Indian being seduced by the suffragettes. Gandhi had travelled to England in 1906 in an effort to convince the British authorities to repeal the most contentious legislation in his country, the Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance of 1906. Because of it, Indians in South Africa were being fingerprinted like common criminals and forced to carry papers, as if they were aliens in their own country. The British were treating them even worse than the Boers they had defeated. Failure to produce the required pass documents resulted in arrest and even deportation without trial. The law also rendered Indian marriages illegal and therefore all children born to them illegitimate. Moreover, the police were using their powers of stop and search to harass Indians at will. Gandhi believed that a British failure to address his community’s concerns would lead to bloodshed on the streets of the Transvaal, something he wanted to avoid at all cost.

  The meetings did not go well, and Gandhi despondently prepared for his return to Durban. Just as he was about to leave, he saw one of the first protests of the WSPU break upon Westminster. Writing for his journal Indian Opinion, under the headline, ‘Deeds Better Than Words’, Gandhi described the suffragettes’ actions: ‘They have sent petitions, written letters, delivered speeches and tried many other means. Last Wednesday they went to the House of Commons as soon as it opened and demanded the right to vote; they caused some damage also, for which they were prosecuted and sentenced to furnish a security of £5 each. On their refusing to do so, they were sentenced to imprisonment and they are now in gaol. Most of the women have got three months. All of them come from respectable families and some are very well educated.’23

  Gandhi spent considerable time describing one particular suffragette, Annie Cobden Sanderson (whom George Bernard Shaw would describe in The Times as ‘one of the nicest women in England’).24 Gandhi quoted the speech she gave from the dock: ‘I shall never obey any law in the making of which I have had not hand; I will not accept the authority of the court executing those laws; if you send me to gaol, I will go there, but I shall on no account pay a fine. I will not furnish any security either.’25 She was sent to Holloway Prison.

  Gandhi was exhilarated by those words and resolved to use suffragette strategy when he went home to South Africa. Arrest, defiance and a refusal to pay fines were to become his first acts of civil disobedience. Later, he would also come to be inspired by the suffragettes’ willingness to go on hunger strike. As he wrote in a newspaper editorial in 1906, the suffragettes had come up with a method that no state, no matter how powerful, could resist: ‘It is no wonder that a people which produces such daughters and mothers should hold the sceptre . . . People do not have much faith in articles and speeches. Anyone can do that, they call for no courage. Deeds after all are better than words. All other things are unavailing and no one is afraid of them. The only way therefore is to sacrifice oneself and take the plunge.’26

  Not only did the suffragettes provide Gandhi with inspiration, they also challenged his preconceptions about women. Gandhi had married his wife, Kasturba, when the two of them were just thirteen and fourteen years of age. She had been the epitome of subservience, putting up with his long absences and vow of chastity with uncomplaining stoicism. The British women he saw throwing themselves at the hooves of charging police horses forced Gandhi to revaluate his opinions: ‘If even women display such courage, will the Transvaal Indians fail in their duty and be afraid of gaol? Or would they rather consider the gaol a palace and readily go there?’ Suffraget
te defiance caused him to think of the future of colonial rule elsewhere in the world. ‘When that time comes,’ he wrote, ‘India’s bonds will snap of themselves.’27

  In the summer of 1909, the WSPU decided that a campaign of stone-throwing and destruction of government property were legitimate strategies. Gandhi, with his non-violent sensibilities, found the shattering glass and increased willingness to brawl with police distasteful. While he now sought to put distance between himself and the suffragettes, others were not finding the WSPU’s decision to embrace militancy nearly so hard to comprehend. While Emmeline Pankhurst and her followers were targeting the windows of Westminster, a group of Indian nationalists set their sights on the men who sat behind them. Their activities centred on a residential address in north London, some twenty miles away from Hampton Court.

  Halfway up Highgate Hill, 65 Cromwell Avenue was a large Victorian mansion, hidden from the road behind tall linden trees. With its redbrick façade and cheery white-framed windows, it was an unlikely hub of political discontent. Purchased a few years earlier, it served as a hostel for some twenty-five foreign students. Thanks to the brown faces which were seen regularly entering and leaving the house, in no time locals took to calling the place ‘India House’. It became a well-known landmark although very little was known about number 65’s mysterious owner.

  Shyamji Krishnavarma was a rich man who had acquired his wealth by marrying the daughter of a successful Bombay merchant. Impeccably dressed with a closely cropped salt-and-pepper beard, receding hairline and small, pebble spectacles, he seemed the epitome of a comfortable middle-class Indian. However, Krishnavarma was a radical nationalist with murder on his mind.

  In his youth he had been a brilliant Sanskrit scholar, with great ambitions. Winning scholarships from two Oxford colleges to study Eastern languages, he seemed well on the way to realising his dreams. Like Gandhi, he had trained as a lawyer, but unlike him, Krishnavarma became bitter when he found himself barred from the high office he felt his intellect warranted. Resentment gave way to thoughts of violence after India’s plague of 1897. In his home city of Bombay and neighbouring Poona, the British had forced tens of thousands from their homes and into makeshift camps in an effort to contain the epidemic. Many Indians felt corralled like animals, left to suffer and die away from their loved ones. As the government blocked thousands of terrified residents from fleeing the cities, panic spread almost as quickly as the disease. Soldiers made the hysteria worse by conducting heavy-handed house-to-house searches, looking for the infected.

  Krishnavarma blamed the British for treating his countrymen with a lack of humanity. He blamed them for reducing Indians to second-class status in their own country and for smothering the language and culture that he loved with their own. He decided to punish them for all their transgressions.

  When he bought the imposing north London mansion on Highgate Hill, Krishnavarma let it be known that he had done so to help his fellow countrymen. The capital’s landlords were reluctant to rent to brown-skinned foreigners, no matter how well they spoke. As well as providing a much-needed roof over their heads, he handed out scholarships to bright young Indians who wished to attend English universities but who were too poor to do so. His work made him a hero in the eyes of many impressionable young men. Biding his time, Krishnavarma waited for the right people to walk through his doors.28

  It was not long before 65 Cromwell Avenue began to attract exactly the kind of people he was looking for. Disgruntled Indians, Irish nationalists, Russians, and an assortment of continental radicals all gathered at the house for weekly lectures and study groups. Although they placed India House under surveillance, the British failed to take the place seriously. They regarded it as a house of hot air more than a threat to national security. However, on 1 July 1909, just after 11 p.m., seven shots rang out in Kensington that confirmed the building’s place in history. The gunman’s target was Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie, ADC to the Secretary of State for India, and the very man who had, just six months before, prepared detailed but magnanimous files on Sophia Duleep Singh.

  Curzon Wyllie had been attending a formal event at the Imperial Institute as a guest of the National Indian Association, a benign body which followed the Gokhale school of moderate nationalism. The evening had been convivial, with most people arriving at eight, eating canapés and drinking wine until the arrival of the guest of honour. Curzon Wyllie and his wife arrived just after ten, and the atmosphere was merry as he took to the dais, praising the successful partnership in India between the Raj and the ruled. Guests of both nationalities applauded his speech, raising their glasses to a mutually beneficial future. Musical entertainment followed and people mingled happily. Then at about eleven, Sir William’s wife indicated it was time to leave.29

  The couple said their goodbyes, Lady Curzon Wyllie walking ahead, while her husband was accosted by numerous guests keen to shake his hand. It was then that a tall, wiry young Indian in a Western suit and tie came out of the crowd and stood in Curzon Wyllie’s path. Twenty-six-year-old Madhan Lal Dhingra had been studying engineering at University College London and had previously lived at India House. As a legitimate member of the National Indian Association he drew little attention. That night, as well as wearing his smartest suit, which hung loose on his slight frame, he also wore a light blue turban, tied in the style of a Punjabi farmer. Curzon Wyllie smiled broadly and put out his hand in warm greeting, having no reason to suspect Dhingra. He had a passing acquaintance with the young man through his father, a respected physician and supporter of British India.30

  As he got close enough to touch him, Dhingra pulled out a gun and fired multiple rounds at close range into Curzon Wyllie’s face. The lieutenant colonel crumpled into the arms of a Parsee doctor, Cowasji Lalkaka, who had been escorting him to the door. Other bullets which had been intended for Curzon Wyllie hit the doctor in the upper body as he attempted to cradle the fallen man in his arms. Amid piercing screams, Lalkaka fell at Curzon Wyllie’s side, their blood pooling together on the floor.31

  Dhingra had come to the party that night armed with a revolver, two pistols and two knives, hidden in the pockets of his suit. He attempted to shoot himself at the scene, but was prevented from doing so when fellow guests, coming to their senses, leapt to restrain him. The police arrived swiftly and after a brief struggle Madhan Lal Dhingra was led quietly away. The investigation that followed revealed India House for what it was: a training camp for radical young Indians. The outhouse of the mansion was found to contain chemicals, bomb-making manuals and a printing press which produced piles of virulently anti-British pamphlets. India House became arguably the first foreign terrorist cell on English soil.32

  Madhan Lal Dhingra was tried for the murder of Curzon Wyllie and the Parsee doctor on 23 July 1909 at the Old Bailey. He refused to recognise the court, and would only give one statement in the dock: ‘I maintain that if it is patriotic in an Englishman to fight against the Germans if they were to occupy this country, it is much more justifiable and patriotic in my case to fight against the English. I hold the English people responsible for the murder of 80 millions of Indian people in the last fifty years, and they are also responsible for taking away £100,000,000 every year from India to this country. I also hold them responsible for the hanging and deportation of my patriotic countrymen.’33

  Dhingra had no feelings of remorse: ‘I am surprised at the terrible hypocrisy, the farce, and the mockery of the English people. They pose as the champions of oppressed humanity – the peoples of the Congo and the people of Russia – when there is terrible oppression and horrible atrocities committed in India; for example, the killing of two millions of people every year and the outraging of our women . . . I make this statement, not because I wish to plead for mercy or anything of that kind. I wish that English people should sentence me to death, for in that case the vengeance of my countrymen will be all the more keen . . .’34

  Madhan Lal Dhingra went to the gallows on 17 August at f
ive past ten in the morning. His family had disowned him and the state refused to cremate him according to his Hindu faith. Dhingra’s body lay buried in an anonymous plot, under English soil, for decades.

  15

  The Hampton Court Harridan

  Quite apart from the assassination of Curzon Wyllie, the summer of 1909 proved to be wretched for King Edward VII’s government. Two miles from India House, an artist called Marion Wallace-Dunlop started a chain of events which shook the British penal system to its foundations. On 5 July, as inmates at Holloway Prison in north London were counted, and preparations made for the first meal of the day, Marion informed her guards that she would not be eating her ‘boiled egg, thin toast and tea’.1 She then went on to refuse her lunch and evening meal, vowing to continue in this manner until the governor recognised her as a political prisoner. So began the first suffragette hunger strike in history, and a long and relentless headache for the state.

  In her mid-forties, Marion Wallace Dunlop was a tall, slim woman, with a sharp face and look of perpetual determination on her pursed, thin lips. Her father had been decorated for distinguished service during the Indian Mutiny; however Marion better identified with older ancestors, describing herself as ‘a direct descendant of the mother of William Wallace’,2 the Scottish rebel who defeated the English army in 1297. Marion was in prison because ten days earlier she had walked up to the gates of the House of Commons and produced a large ink stamp from her handbag. Pushing it calmly onto the great block of stone outside the main entrance, she left a black, indelible calling card. It read: ‘Women’s Deputation. June 29. Bill of Rights. It is the right of the subjects to petition the King, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal.’3 Making no attempt to hide her act, committed right under the noses of the policemen stationed at St Stephen’s Gate, the entrance to the House of Commons, Marion was promptly arrested.