The Last Princesses of Punjab is a new exhibition at Kensington Palace, opened in March 2026 to mark what would have been Princess Sophia Duleep Singh’s 150th birthday. It’s the first exhibition Kensington Palace has ever dedicated to the women of the Duleep Singh dynasty, curated by Polly Putnam of Historic Royal Palaces alongside historian Mishka Singh.
Rather than a single royal biography, it unfolds as a web of six interconnected lives: Sophia, her sisters Catherine and Bamba, her mother Bamba Muller, her grandmother Jind Kaur, and her godmother, Queen Victoria. Through rare paintings, jewellery, photographs, letters, and documents, many never before displayed, the exhibition traces their journey from the fall of the Punjab kingdom to exile in England, and finally to the lives these women carved out for themselves between two worlds.
To understand the princesses, you first have to understand what was taken from their father. Maharaja Duleep Singh was still a child when he was forced to surrender the Sikh Empire to the East India Company. Separated from his mother, he arrived in England at just nine years old, converted to Christianity, and was folded into the world of British aristocracy, eventually becoming, remarkably, one of Queen Victoria’s favourites.
The exhibition doesn’t shy away from how strange and layered that relationship was. Victoria was, at once, the imperial power that dismantled Duleep Singh’s kingdom, and the guardian who personally oversaw his education and later ensured his daughters retained status and financial security. One of the exhibition’s most striking objects captures this contradiction perfectly: Victoria’s own autobiography, inscribed with a handwritten note addressed to Duleep himself.
If Victoria represents one axis of power in this story, Maharani Jind Kaur represents another entirely. She’s the first face you encounter in the exhibition, a commanding 1862 portrait by George Richmond that seems to demand a kind of instant reverence.
But the curators are careful not to let that awe stand alone. Jind Kaur was the regent of the Sikh Empire, ruling on her young son’s behalf, and a fierce resister of British expansion. She was also a mother, imprisoned after her armies’ defeat in the Anglo-Sikh Wars and separated from her son for thirteen years while he grew up an ocean away, under a different queen’s watch.
Above a doorway in the exhibition, gold lettering carries her words, written to face her own portrait: “Do justice to me.” It’s a phrase that echoes through the rest of the exhibition in ways the curators may not have entirely intended.
At the centre of it all is Sophia Duleep Singh, and it’s easy to see why. Her life reads like something out of fiction. Raised in England, granted a grace-and-favour apartment near Hampton Court Palace by her godmother Victoria, Sophia grew into one of the most committed and fearless suffragettes of her era.
She sold copies of The Suffragette newspaper outside her own apartments, an image so provocative in 1913 that it scandalized the press. She was taken to court three separate times for refusing to pay taxes, arguing that a woman denied representation had no obligation to fund the state that denied her. She marched at Black Friday alongside Emmeline Pankhurst, and later wrote directly to Winston Churchill to report police brutality she witnessed, fully aware that her royal title would make sure the letter landed where it needed to.
Her spoiled 1911 census record, marked with her refusal to be counted, sits alongside suffrage banners and photographs of Sophia and her sister Catherine at a 1930 dinner commemorating the movement’s earliest arrests. It’s a portrait of someone who understood exactly how to weaponize her own privilege against the system that granted it to her.
Sophia doesn’t stand alone, and the exhibition makes sure of that.
Her mother, Bamba Muller, was born in Egypt to a German banker and an enslaved Ethiopian woman, raised in poverty, and educated at a Christian mission in Cairo, where she met Duleep Singh. A surviving letter, written in both Arabic and English, hints at a life that wasn’t always happy in her adopted England. She died in 1886, just a year after her husband left the family.
Her sister Catherine Duleep Singh lived a quieter but no less remarkable life. She shared a deeply personal, intimate bond with her former chaperone Lina Schäfer in Germany, and she’s since become an icon for LGBTQ+ South Asian women. After Lina’s death, Catherine turned her grief into action, becoming a guarantor for Jewish families fleeing Nazi persecution, housing and employing refugees at her Buckinghamshire home. One particularly moving object on display is a jewelled heirloom pendant Catherine eventually gave to an eight-year-old refugee girl she helped bring to safety.
Her eldest sister, Bamba Sutherland, took a different path entirely, returning to Lahore in the 1940s and spending her life asserting her claim to her father’s lost lands while collecting and preserving traditional Punjabi crafts and textiles.
What keeps The Last Princesses of Punjab from feeling like a purely academic exercise is how deliberately it reaches into the present. Composer Rushil Ranjan scores the galleries with a soundtrack drawing on Sufi tradition and the poetry of Bulleh Shah, and contemporary artist Chila Kumari Singh Burman bookends the experience with a neon reimagining of Jind Kaur’s silhouette, part of her ongoing exploration of South Asian feminism.
British South Asian voices thread through the exhibition throughout, responding to themes of identity, resistance, and belonging, making clear this isn’t just a story about the past. It’s a story still being written by the diaspora it helped create.
This exhibition offers something rare: an intimate, unflinching look at how empire shaped six extraordinary women’s lives, told through artifacts most people will never have another chance to see, from Victoria’s annotated autobiography to Sophia’s handwritten letter to Churchill to jewellery seized by imperial forces and later returned to its rightful owners.
But its deeper value is in the questions it leaves you with. Who gets remembered fully, and who gets left at the margins, even by the institutions trying to make things right? Walking through Kensington Palace, past a hundred years of curated royal memory, that question follows you out the door.
