The Last Princesses of Punjab opens on Thursday at Kensington Palace

The extraordinary life of an exiled Punjabi princess, embraced by the British royal court and a goddaughter of Queen Victoria, but who would become a pioneering suffragette and challenge the very authority of the elite social circles in which she moved, is to be told in a new exhibition.

Princess Sophia Duleep Singh was the daughter of Duleep Singh, the last Sikh maharajah of the Punjab. As a child he was forced to surrender his lands to the East India Company in 1849, and sign away the famous Koh-i-noor diamond, now a potent symbol of colonial exploitation and set in the crown of the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.