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Queen asked
Ranjit Singh's wife to end dynasty: Book
WSN Network
 LONDON:
Queen Victoria instructed the wife of the grandson of Maharaja
Ranjit Singh not to have children in a bid to maintain the hold of
the British Raj over the Sikh kingdom in Punjab, a new book has
claimed.
Queen Victoria
instructed Lady Anne Alice Blanche, the aristocratic English wife of
Duleep Singh's eldest son Prince Victor Albert Jay not to have
children, Peter Bance, a British author claimed in his book
"Sovereign, Squire & Rebel".
The book is a
biography of Duleep Singh, son of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and has a
foreword by Patwant Singh, the scholar activist who passed away
earlier this month.
It claimed that
the Queen gave the instruction 12 years after the British army
physically stopped a disgruntled and rebellious Duleep Singh from
returning to India from England, where he had been taken as a
12-year-old boy-king.
Like his father,
Prince Victor also made a futile bid to visit India in 1898 to spend
honeymoon with Lady Anne, but they were stopped by the British in
Colombo.
On their return,
they attended a ball thrown by Queen
Victoria
at Buckingham Palace on July 8, 1898, where among the invitees was
Prince Victor's sister Princess Sophia, younger brother Prince
Frederick and several other royals visiting from India.
It was after the
ball, Queen Victoria gave the instruction to Princess Anne not to
have children.
The book also
refers to a second claim about an alleged British plot to stem the
royal Sikh bloodline.
According to it,
Princess Bamba, Duleep Singh's youngest daughter from his first
marriage, had told members of the Fakir family, who were former
ministers in her father's court, that when they were children their
English cooks would put "certain substances" into their food so as
to make them infertile.
None of Duleep
Singh's children had any issue.
19
August 2009
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