1. Princess Bamba Sutherland was a member of the royal family that ruled the Sikh Empire in the Punjab.
26 Facts About Bamba Sutherland
1. 2.
Bamba Sutherland was a close and personal friend of Indian revolutionaries whom she hosted at her house in Lahore like Lala Lajpat Rai.
3.
Princess Bamba Sutherland was born on 29 September 1869, in London.
4.
Bamba Sutherland's father was a great favorite and godchild of Queen Victoria of England and her son King Edward who protected Bamba and her siblings after the untimely demise of her father who had been brought to Britain as a child under the care of the East India Company, after the Punjab invasion of the Second Anglo-Sikh War and the subsequent annexation of the Punjab on 29 March 1849.
5.
Bamba Sutherland died in England when Duleep was still a young adult.
6.
Bamba Sutherland Muller was raised in Cairo, and was the daughter of Ludwig Muller, a German merchant banker of Todd Muller and Company, and Sofia, his Jewish wife, who was of Abyssinian descent.
7.
Bamba Sutherland's marriage came after Queen Victoria had unsuccessfully tried to persuade him to marry a Christian convert from a royal South Indian family who had been similarly kidnapped and after Queen Victoria had demeaned her son the future King Edward for not following her Victorian ways of purity.
8.
Bamba Sutherland was a great favorite of King Edward who was a frequent visitor to their home Elveden Hall.
9.
Princess Bamba Sutherland was their first daughter and was named after her mother, her maternal grandmother, and her paternal grandmother.
10.
Bamba Sutherland lived at Elveden Hall until her mother and her siblings were moved to London by Crown Authorities after her father escaped to Paris.
11.
Bamba Sutherland went to the United States for medical school at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois where she completed 3 years of schooling with distinction till the school administration decided that women could no longer study medical education due to their gender.
12.
When Bamba Sutherland decided to move to India, she hired a companion.
13.
Bamba Sutherland supervised the transfer of ashes from Bombay to Lahore where they had been placed when her father had once visited India briefly.
14.
Finally, Princess Bamba Sutherland deposited the ashes in the memorial to Maharaja Ranjit Singh, her grandfather, in Lahore.
15.
Bamba Sutherland was widowed in Lahore when her husband died in 1939.
16.
Dr Bamba Sutherland was the principal of the medical college of Lahore.
17.
Bamba Sutherland had moved to Scotland many years previously, but she refused to, citing her love of her home country and her hope for their independence.
18.
Bamba Sutherland was an incredible hostess, bringing many revolutionaries that established India's independence.
19.
Bamba Sutherland's will specified that red roses be placed on her grave from time to time.
20.
Bamba Sutherland has many living relatives who were related to Maharaja Ranjit Singh who lived in what is Punjab, India.
21.
Bamba Sutherland refused to leave her home and Lahore, the capital of the Sikhs, as she could not part with their kingdom.
22.
Bamba Sutherland died on 10 March 1957, in Lahore, surrounded by friends.
23.
Bamba Sutherland refused to leave Lahore despite partition as she didn't agree with the division of the country into India and Pakistan.
24.
Bamba Sutherland has many relatives in Punjab and the Jatt Sikh aristocracy remembers her fight for an independent India with great love.
25.
Bamba Sutherland was a revolutionary, a suffragette, and beloved to the Sikh community.
26.
Bamba Sutherland left a large quantity of important historical items to her secretary, Pir Karim Bakhsh Supra of Lahore, who gave them to the Pakistani government to be put on display publicly.