Jind Kaur - Reunion and Final Years

Reunion and Final Years

In November 1856 Jung Bahadour sent the Governor-General of India a letter he had intercepted from Duleep Singh to Jind Kaur suggesting that she come to England. The letter was dismissed as a forgery. However, shortly afterwards Duleep Singh commissioned Pundit Nehemiah Goreh to visit Kathmandu on his behalf and find out how his mother was managing. This attempt was also doomed to failure and the Pundit was forbidden to contact the Maharani. Duleep Singh then decided to go himself, using the pretext of a tiger shoot in Bengal. In 1860 he wrote to the British Resident in Kathmandu, enclosing his letter in one from Sir John Login so that it would not be intercepted or dismissed as a forgery. The Resident reported that the Rani had 'much changed, was blind and had lost much of the energy which formerly characterised her.' The British decided that she was no longer a threat and on 16 January 1861 she was permitted to join her son at Spence’s Hotel, in Calcutta. At the time several Sikh regiments were returning home via Calcutta at the end of the Chinese war. The presence of Sikh royalty in the city gave rise to demonstrations of joy and loyalty. The hotel was surrounded by thousands of armed Sikhs and the Governor-General, Lord Canning, requested Duleep Singh, as a favour, to leave for England with his mother by the next boat.

During the passage to England, Duleep Singh wrote to Sir John Login, who had been his guardian throughout his adolescence in British hands, asking him to find a house for his mother near Lancaster Gate. Soon after her arrival, Lady Login visited with her three youngest children. She had heard tales of the Maharani’s beauty and influence and strength of will and was curious to meet the woman who had wielded such power. Her compassion was aroused when she met a tired half-blind woman, her health broken and her beauty vanished. "Yet the moment she grew interested and excited in a subject, unexpected gleams and glimpses through the haze of indifference and the torpor of advancing age revealed the shrewd and plotting brain of her, who had once been known as the ‘Messalina of the Punjab’."

While in India Duleep Singh had negotiated the return of the Maharani’s jewellery, which had been kept in the treasury at Benares. These arrived at Lancaster Gate just before the Maharani returned Lady Login’s visit, and her delight was so great that “she forthwith decorated herself, and her attendants, with an assortment of the most wonderful necklaces and earrings, strings of lovely pearls and emeralds”, to wear during the visit. The portrait of the Maharani by George Richmond shows her wearing some of the jewels, including the emerald and pearl necklace, which was sold by auction on 8 October 2009 at Bonhams for £55,200.

For a while Duleep Singh moved with his mother to Mulgrave Castle in Yorkshire. Attempts were made to arrange a separate establishment for her on the estate, but she was determined not to be separated from her son. In the last two years of her life she reminded the Maharaja of his Sikh heritage and told him of the empire that had once been his, sowing the seeds that twenty years later led him to research for weeks in the British Library and to petition Queen Victoria, hoping naïvely to remedy the injustice he had suffered.

In the morning of 1 August 1863 Maharani Jind Kaur died peacefully in her sleep in Abingdon House, Kensington. Cremation was illegal in Great Britain before 1885 and Duleep Singh was refused permission to take his mother’s body to the Punjab, so it was kept for a while in the Dissenters’ Chapel in Kensal Green Cemetery. In the spring of 1864 the Maharaja obtained permission to take the body to Bombay in India, where it was cremated, and he erected a small samadh in memory of his mother on the Panchavati side of the Godavari River. The memorial was maintained by the Kapurthala State Authorities until 1924, when Princess Bamba Sutherland moved her remains and the memorial to the Samadh of Maharaja Ranjit Singh in Lahore.