Broadcaster, journalist and biographer Anita Anand was born in 1972 and educated at King’s College, London.

Spruce up your springtime reading list with six brand-new recommendations for series six of Between the Covers. Six thrilling new book releases Sophia and her family cannot be understood without understanding the context of developments in the British Empire in this period. Giving details on the development of Sikh traditions, revolutionary ferment in the Indian subcontinent, the British suffrage movement, the First World War, and the partition of India and Pakistan, Anand presents a comprehensive and valuable historical biography. Anand has gone into key archives at Windsor, the Museum of London and elsewhere to uncover the official records and surviving correspondence about Sophia, enriched by photographs and her own interviews. This is a necessary biography, drawing attention to the broader facets of the British suffragette movement and the depth of connections between the Indian subcontinent and Britain in the Victorian and Edwardian eras * The Times * Anand has presented the BBC Radio 4 show Midweek, and on television she has been a presenter on the Heaven and Earth Show. She has co-presented the Daily Politics on BBC Two with Andrew Neil from September 2008, with a break for maternity leave from January to September 2010. After training as a journalist, Anand became European Head of News and Current Affairs for Zee TV, and one of the youngest TV news editors in Britain at the age of 25. [5] She presented the talk show The Big Debate and was political correspondent for Zee TV presenting the Raj Britannia series – 31 documentaries chronicling the political aspirations of the Asian community in the most marginal constituencies in 1997. But most of all she obsessed about her pooches, refusing suggestions that she might put the dogs in steerage with her maid, and “adamant that she was the best person to care for them, she fed the dogs on fine cuts of meat and the occasional nip of brandy”.These questions have yielded three books so far, and the popular ongoing podcast Empire, which Anand co-hosts with the historian William Dalrymple.

Anand, Anita (2015). Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1408835456. Part II of the book describes Sophia's life as an activist, primarily as a suffragette. It gives a good picture of the later more militant part of the suffrage movement, specifically her involvement in the WSPU under Emmeline Pankhurst. Most of my reading about suffrage has been about the movement in the US, so the information was good, but the level of violence by the organization was a surprise to me, specifically the firebombing. Although Sophia didn't firebomb anything, she did participate in acts that resulted in arrest for others, but not for her because of her political visibility.The royal office refused Duleep’s re-entry into India, fearful that his presence might spark an insurrection. Feeling trapped, he turned his attention to fashioning his British countryside home into a Moghul palace. Sophia grew up with leopards prowling in pens below her bedroom window and Indian hunting hawks falling from the sky due to the cold. Duleep eventually died alone in Paris. From the debris of her father’s dynasty, Princess Sophia channelled her fury into becoming patron saint of the underdog Last year for the second MISS DARK'S APPARITIONS book I read two books on British relations with India, one dealing with the Koh-I-Noor diamond and the other with Indians in London. Both of them mentioned Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, daughter of the last maharajah of the Punjab who became a firebrand suffragette and supporter of Indian independence. So, I decided to catch her biography on audiobook. I'm glad I did, because it was often fascinating. Sophia and her sisters were able to get to India as adults. The experience of meeting people fighting for Indian independence awoke the political consciousness of Sophia. She returned to England and threw herself into the fight of Women's Suffrage in the 1910s.