This episode explores the life of Princess Bamba Duleep Singh, the eldest daughter of the last Maharaja of Punjab. Unlike her sisters, Bamba was consumed by anger over Britain's theft of her family's kingdom, leading her to spend her life in Lahore as a defiant, anti-British figure. Her story is a tragic arc of fury, failed ambition, and lonely death, yet it offers a powerful lens on colonial dispossession and the complex legacies of empire.
Summarized by Podsumo
Princess Bamba, born in London in 1869, was described from age three as having 'the worst temper in the nursery' and carried a lifelong rage at the British for dispossessing her family of the Sikh Empire.
She pursued a medical degree in Chicago in the early 1900s, only to have it revoked when Northwestern University decided 'women cannot grasp surgery,' a defeat that deepened her bitterness.
Bamba remained in Lahore through the 1947 Partition of India, protected by a Muslim servant, becoming the 'last Sikh in Lahore' after ethnic cleansing drove away the Sikh population.
She married an Australian colonial doctor, Colonel David Waters Sutherland—a man from the 'Raj central casting'—as a means to access her family's money and gain legitimacy to stay in India.
Bamba died alone in 1957, buried under a Christian cross in a Pakistani cemetery, with no Sikh to say final prayers, and her epitaph reads: 'If you open this grave, you will just not know who is rich and who is poor.'
"This is a woman who refused to ever accept what the British did to her father. Eventually she will go and try and reclaim her father’s stolen kingdom."
"She’s going to be the last Sikh in Lahore. She’s not going to go just because the companies happen to have changed. This is her city."
"She still calls herself to the very end the queen of the Punjab, the last true sovereign of the Sikhs. But to everybody around her in this new country, Pakistan, she’s an anachronism."