Anita Anand – Sophia – Times of India

I am often asked how I found Sophia but honestly, she found me. I was on maternity leave in 2010 and to keep my brain awake, I read voraciously in the short windows between my son’s naps. One morning, as I turned the pages of a local magazine I was transfixed by a single image my tired mind could not explain. It showed a brown-skinned woman dressed as an Edwardian lady , selling copies of a militant suffragette newspaper outside `her home at Hampton Court Palace’. She looked Indian. My curiosity was further stoked when I discovered that her surname was Singh, my name too by marriage. I tugged on a thread, and an avalanche of a story landed on me. Princess Sophia Duleep Singh would take me on one of the greatest journalistic adventures of my life…

It was like a hunt for a missing person where the clues were buried under dust and the most of the witnesses were dead…

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