Hello and welcome back to the Historic Royal Palaces podcast and episode two of our series on The Last Princesses of Punjab.

I'm curator Polly Putnam and I'm here with my colleague, curator and exhibition historian Dr. Mishkishanha.

Hello listeners.

To our company, our new exhibition at Kensington Palace, we're exploring the lives of the Jleep Singh Sisters.

In this episode, we'll find out how the sisters began to exercise their own power and identities as young women.

What exactly was their relationship with India?

And how was their growing activism shaped by their individual identities and connection to their heritage?

Joining us today are two brilliant historians. Professor Chavon Lambert Hurley is Professor

of Global History at the University of Sheffield and Professor Sumita Mukherjee is Professor

of Modern History at the University of Bristol. Thank you both for being here with us today.

Thanks, Polly. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Right, Mishka, perhaps we can start

with a summary of where we are picking up the story in the three women's lives. We left them on

the precipice of womanhood, orphaned and living with a family called the Oliphants in Brighton, where they had a

governess called Lena Schaefer. We'll hear a little bit more about Lena later, but what do we

know about the sisters' education and what came next for them? So the two older sisters, Bamba and Catherine,

are both off to Somerville College at Oxford.

And it is one of the first women's colleges at Oxford, and they are amongst the first

women to study at Oxford, as well as amongst the first South Asian women.

They have this experience, which is not just about education, but it's also about interacting with some really

key figures, including women who were later on important to the suffragette movement.

And very importantly, a woman called Cornelia Sorabji, who ended up becoming the first woman

to get a law degree. From Oxford, of course, they didn't get degrees yet,

...