Showing results for "Anita Anand" in Biographies & Memoirs

In 1876 Sophia Duleep Singh was born into royalty. Her father, Maharajah Duleep Singh, was heir to the Kingdom of the Sikhs. Exiled to England, the dispossessed Maharajah transformed his estate at Elveden in Suffolk into a Moghul palace. Sophia, god-daughter of Queen Victoria, was raised a genteel aristocratic Englishwoman: presented at court, afforded grace-and-favour lodgings at Hampton Court Palace and photographed wearing the latest fashions for the society pages. But when, in secret defiance of the British government, she travelled to India, she returned a revolutionary.

The Patient Assassin covers the events of the Amritsar Massacre of 1919 in which hundreds of lives were lost when the army opened fire on a crowd with no warnings. An injured survivor, Udham Singh, vowed, wiping blood-soaked earth onto his forehead, that he would kill the men responsible. The Patient Assassin follows him through Africa and the US and across Europe to end up in front of Sir Michael O'Dwyer, who had sent the men to attack.

In 1876 Sophia Duleep Singh was born into Indian royalty. Her father, Maharajah Duleep Singh, was heir to the Kingdom of the Sikhs, one of the greatest empires of the Indian subcontinent. Sophia transcended her heritage to devote herself to battling injustice and inequality, a far cry from the life to which she was born. Her causes were the struggle for Indian Independence, the fate of the lascars, the welfare of Indian soldiers in the First World War--and, above all, the fight for female suffrage.