UK HONOUR FOR MAHARAJA RANJIT SINGH's GRAND-DAUGHTER.

Maharaja Ranjit Singh's grand-daughter, Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, has been honoured with a Royal Mail stamp for her rights activism. A photograph showing Sophia, daughter of Bamba Mueller and Maharaja Duleep Singh, the last ruler  of the Sikh empire, selling copies of the Suffragette mewspaper in 1913 outside Hampton Court Palace has been used for a stamp to commemorate this heroine of the British movement to get equal voting rights for women. The 1.57 Pound stamp is one of eight issued by Royal Mail on Tuesday to 'mark the centenary of the Representation of the People Act (in the UK) where for the first time women won the right to vote in parliamentary elections'. The stamps will be released for public use on 15th February, 2018. This is the first time a person of Sikh background has been featured on a Royal Mail stamp. 
Sophia was the youngest of Maharaja Duleep Singh's five surviving children. Born in the UK in 1876 during her father's lifelong exile, she had Queen Vctoria for god-mother, and was brought up as a 'thoroughly anglicised aristocrat', till she swapped English high society for the Suffragettes, much to the consternation of the royal family and the British government of the day. Sophia's journey from the toast of fashionable parties to a revolutionary was wrought over many years. Her admiration for Lala Lajpat Rai, and his death after being lathi-charged by the British played a significant role in her volte-face.
-Challapalli Srinivas Chakravarthy-
--------------------------------------------------------- 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

VIEWS OF MANU AND KAUTILYA ON THE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE.

The state performed its duty of protection of society and the individual through coercive enforcement of the standards of justice based on the concept of ' Dharma '. From the Vedic period onward, the perennial attitude of Indian culture had been justice and righteousness. Justice, in the Indian context, was a human expression of a wider universal principle of nature and if men were entirely true to nature, their actions would be spontaneously just. Men experienced Justice, in the sense of a distributive equity, as moral justice, social justice, and legal justice. Each of these forms of justice was viewed as a particularisation of the general principle of the universe seen as a total organism. Impartial administration of justice was always regarded as one of the main duties of the King and he was considered to be the fountain of justice. The ethical code of society and its cultural standards were inter-related. The cultural maturity and social amicability and even their det...
Read more

ARCHAEOLOGISTS DISCOVER TOMBS IN EGYPT DATING BACK 2,000 YEARS.

Egypt's antiquities ministry said on 14th August, 2017 (Tuesday) that archaeologists have discovered three tombs dating more than 2,000 years, from the Ptolemaic Period. The discovery was made in the Nile valley province of Minya south of Cairo, in an area known as al-kamin al-Sahrawi. The unearthed sarcophagi and clay fragments suggest that the area was a large necropolis from sometime between the 27th Dynasty and the Greco-Roman period. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 
Read more

ANCIENT INDIA'S LINKS TO TODAY.

You may not have heard of Shu-ilishu but he is a man of great significance. He reaches out to us from almost 4,300 years ago, through a small Akkadian cylinder seal now housed at the Louvre Museum in Paris. On the seal, you will find an image of him talking to two men. The inscription describes Shu-ilishu as the interpreter of the Meluhhan language. 'Meluha' was, in all probability, the term used by ancient Mesopotamians for the Indus Valley region, and the presence of an oficial 'interpreter' there indicates just how important the steady flow of good from the Indian sub-continent was.  Precious and vibrant lapis lazuli stones, carnelian beads, wood and even dogs would go across via old trade routes and ports like Lothal (in modern-day Gujarat) to Akkad, capital of the Akkadian Empire (03rd millennium BCE) and now in modern-day Iraq. There are also references to a settlement of Meluhhans in the city of Guabba in Sumer, in Mesopotamia.  The story of Shi-ilishu and ...
Read more