The Last Maharaja's Daughters: London's Unexamined Colonial Inheritance

A new London exhibition traces the extraordinary lives of the daughters of Maharaja Duleep Singh — royalty rendered refugees, then absorbed into the British establishment. The show raises questions about how museums handle the unfinished business of empire.

By Monexus Staff Writereurope6-minute read26 Apr 2026☆ Save ↗ Share ⎙ Print

In a London gallery this spring, visitors encounter a family that the British Empire created and then quietly forgot. The exhibition, chronicling the lives of the daughters of Maharaja Duleep Singh — the last sovereign of the Sikh Empire, deposed and removed to England as a teenager in 1849 — offers a quietly devastating account of how colonial power operated not merely through conquest but through the domestic absorption of its enemies.

The Singh sisters — Bamba, Catherine, and the others — were raised in Britain, educated in European traditions, and married into aristocratic circles. They were, in the language of empire, "civilised." Yet their father's long campaign to recover his kingdom and his children's inheritance — a battle that ended only with his death in 1879 — runs through the exhibition like an undercurrent the curators have chosen not to smooth away.

What makes the exhibition notable is less its biographical cataloguing than its restraint. It does not reach for easy irony about empire's long reach. It simply presents the documents, the portraits, the letters and the silences, and lets the scale of the disruption make its own argument.

A Sovereign Made into a Ward of the Crown

Duleep Singh's story is well-documented in the colonial record, if selectively mined. He was nine years old when the British signed the Treaty of Lahore following the Anglo-Sikh Wars, surrendering the Punjab to the East India Company and installing a British Resident in Lahore. He was removed from his capital, his state's treasury seized, and his mother and sisters held as collateral for his good behaviour. By 1854, he had been brought to England, presented to Queen Victoria, and effectively made a ward of the British court — a child monarch kept comfortable enough to avoid embarrassment, stripped of the power that might have made him dangerous.

He converted to Christianity under missionary influence, took up residence at Wrestingworth in Bedfordshire, and was encouraged to consider himself fortunate. The crown jewels of the Sikh Empire — the Koh-i-Noor among them — had already been handed over. The empire was over.

Yet Duleep Singh never fully accepted his subjugation. His correspondence, portions of which appear in the exhibition, shows a man who understood the arrangement for what it was. He wrote directly to the British government demanding restoration of his kingdom, the return of his mother, and the jewels that had been extracted under duress. He was refused. Repeatedly.

The daughters were raised in the aftermath of their father's quiet desperation. They were given every advantage of British education and social standing. They married well. Catherine Sophie Duleep Singh, who appears most prominently in the exhibition's documentation, became a known figure in Edwardian society, hosting salons and corresponding with figures across the British establishment. She was, by every measure, integrated.

But the exhibition resists presenting that integration as simply a success story. The letters shown from Catherine to her father — she appears to have maintained a closer relationship with him than the other sisters — suggest a young woman navigating a profound contradiction: raised to be English, attached by blood and conscience to a father still fighting for a kingdom that no longer existed.

The Quiet Work of Erasure

How do museums handle subjects like this? The question is not rhetorical. The exhibition's curation deliberately avoids the framing that would make the Singh sisters simply victims or simply success stories. They were both. They were also something more difficult to categorise: people who were raised to embody a resolution to a political conflict that was never actually resolved.

The Sikh Empire was not transformed into a stable British possession. It was dismantled, its resources extracted, its ruling family scattered. The daughters were integrated into British life, but integration in this context was not a gift — it was a mechanism of control. To make Duleep Singh's children comfortable in England was to foreclose any possibility they might return to Punjab with legitimate claims. The empire needed them close, and British, and quiet.

That the sisters appear to have understood this — or at least to have sensed it — emerges not from any single document but from the cumulative weight of what the exhibition shows: their education, their marriages, their social positions, and their father's letters. They were made into the kind of British subjects the colonial project required. Whether they were complicit in that process or simply its objects is a distinction the exhibition declines to resolve.

What is clear is that the mechanism worked. The Singh family largely disappeared from public memory in Britain by the mid-twentieth century. The haveli in Punjab fell into ruin. The correspondence was archived. The sisters' grandchildren, where they exist, would in many cases have no knowledge of the family's original standing. Colonial power's deepest achievement is not the conquest but the subsequent forgetting — and the careful management of who gets remembered and how.

The Stakes of Reappearance

The exhibition arrives at a moment when British institutions are grappling unevenly with their colonial histories. Several major museums have undertaken repatriation reviews for objects taken under unclear circumstances. Debates about the Koh-i-Noor's status — which Indian and Pakistani authorities have periodically raised — continue without resolution. The question of whether empire should be narrated from the perspective of its administrators or its subjects remains contested in ways that affect how galleries are curated, what gets displayed, and what gets explained.

The Singh sisters offer a case that complicates any simple resolution of those debates. They were not simply subjects — their father was a head of state. They were not simply victims — their lives, by objective measures of comfort and education, were privileged. They were neither British nor, after a point, recognisably Sikh in the way their father had been. They occupied a middle ground that empire created and then left largely unexamined.

What the exhibition does, perhaps most effectively, is refuse to let visitors leave with a clean category. The sisters were extraordinary. They were also products of a system designed to render extraordinary people ordinary, or at least manageable. The show does not argue this explicitly — it does not argue at all — but the structural logic of what it displays makes the point clearly enough.

What Comes Next

The exhibition's immediate audience is likely to be those with existing connections to Punjabi or Sikh history, or those with academic interests in colonial-era biography. But its most interesting work may be with visitors who arrive with no prior knowledge — who encounter the Singh sisters as people rather than as representatives of a cause.

Whether that encounter leads anywhere depends partly on the institution's willingness to follow the story to its uncomfortable conclusion. Duleep Singh's campaign for restoration ended with his death, but the political questions his case raised — about the legitimacy of annexations, the status of deposed sovereigns, the obligations of occupying powers to the families of those they displace — were never resolved. They simply became irrelevant as the empire consolidated itself and the people who might have pressed them were absorbed.

The exhibition, to its credit, does not try to resolve those questions. It shows the documents, tells the story, and steps back. In doing so, it raises them in a way that feels more honest than the standard museum treatments of colonial history, which tend toward either celebration or apology. What the Singh sisters deserve — and what this exhibition largely provides — is to be seen plainly, without the interpretive frameworks that would make their story easier to process.

That they were extraordinary is not in question. That their extraordinariness was manufactured by forces beyond their control is the fact the exhibition most effectively communicates. In doing so, it says something about empire that is still worth saying: that its machinery was not only military and administrative, but personal and familial — that it worked by taking children and reshaping them until they forgot what they had been taken from.

This desk published a second article on the same exhibition one week earlier, foregrounding the colonial-absorption framework. This piece takes the biography and lets the structural argument emerge from it.