369. The First British Indians: The Suffragette Princess (Ep 1)

Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnim. And me, William Drumple. So today we're going to start a mini-series about the extraordinary daughters of the last ruler of the Sikh Empire, the Maharaja of the Punjab. Now, these four episodes are going to take us through the stories of different sisters. You have Sophia, Catherine, Bamba, Irene and Pauline.

Now these stories are so diverse. They include the suffragettes, the women who fought to get women the vote, mixed-race life in Edwardian London, lesbian love in Nazi Germany, and resistance against the British Empire. And let me tell you, Empire club members get this whole series in one go with no ads, so just follow the link in the description to join our club. Now these princesses grew up in the heart of the British Empire, which had destroyed their world and their family. And in this, I'm going to hand the reins over to Anita because this is really not just her story, it's a story which she discovered, which she made famous, a woman who had been totally forgotten by history was resurrected, and you wrote a wonderful book about it, which I much loved and enjoyed and reviewed.

You did, and you were very, very kind of it. And, you know, it's probably whatever I do in this life, the thing I'm going to be most proud of. I wrote the biography of Princess Sophia de Leepsing and published it in 2015. And, you know, you've got to just imagine at that time, no one had ever heard of the Indian suffragette. It was just a strange, weird.

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