The United Kingdom’s Royal Mail has honoured an Indian princess by issuing a postal stamp with her picture and name for her contribution towards championing the right of women to vote in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s granddaughter, Princess Sophia Alexandra Duleep Singh was a suffragette an activist seeking the right for women to cast their vote at the turn of the 20th century in the UK.
The 1.57 GBP stamp features a black-and-white picture of Princess Sophia, daughter of the India’s last Sikh king, Prince Duleep Singh who was taken prisoner by the British and forced into exile in the UK, selling copies of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) newspaper outside London’s Hampton Court in 1913.
Among the eight stamps issued by the Royal Mail to mark the centenary of the 'Representation of the People Act 191'8 which, for the first time, gave women over 30 (and men over 21) the right to vote, Princess Sophia is the only woman to have a stamp all to herself.
Her father had married an Ethiopian-German lady, Bamba Muller, during one of his trips to Egypt while Queen Victoria was her godmother, who had bestowed upon her a residence in London’s Hampton Court where she lived most of her life.
Although Princess Sophia was an active suffragette, she is best remembered for her activism in the Women’s Tax Resistance League, which insisted that women should not pay taxes if they didn’t have the right to vote.
For her opposition to the law, she along with many of her co-protestors were arrested and appeared in court defending women’s right to vote, known as 'suffrage'.
BBC journalist Anita Anand is credited with bringing Princess Sophia’s memory back to the public domain as she had become invisible under the dust and clamour of time. Anand researched for five years before finally writing her book on her titled Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary.
