History restored.

Byline: F.S. Aijazuddin

REREADING a book I had written over 40 years ago, in 1978, brought back memories of a quest that took me from the Lahore Fort to a hunting lodge near Baghbanpura, Queen Victoria's summer home Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, a secretive mansion in Norfolk, and the Christian graveyard on Jail Road (Lahore).

It began with an interest in the Princess Bamba collection in the Sikh Gallery of the Lahore Fort. The gallery in which they were displayed had been specially adapted to protect a precious group of paintings and other relics associated with the last Sikh Maharaja Duleep Singh (Bamba's father). He had been deposed in 1849, externed to Fatehgarh where he converted to Christianity, and taken to England in 1854 where he became a protege of Queen Victoria.

He moved in royal circles and might have died satiated as a settled country squire, had he not been reunited in 1861 with his mother the redoubtable Rani Jind Kaur. She had instigated (and lost) the First Sikh war in 1846 that presaged the annexation of the Punjab in 1849. Her revenge was to make a Sikh out of Duleep Singh and then pit him against the British government that had snatched from him the Koh-i-Noor diamond, his father's golden throne, and swallowed a kingdom larger than Queen Victoria's United Kingdom.

'The Court of Lahore' remains a lesson in Machiavellian politics.

At the Fort, I discovered a map prepared by my ancestor Fakir Qamaruddin that marked places of significant interest - where the toshakhana or treasury once stood, the maktabkhana or archive where his uncle Fakir Azizuddin stored state treaties, and the bloodied spots where murders had taken place. I traced the hunting lodge at Shah Bilawal (behind the University of Engineering and Technology) where Duleep Singh's half-brother Sher Singh had been assassinated in September 1843, propelling the juvenile Duleep Singh to the throne.

The next stage of my quest took me to the UK, to Osborne House where Duleep had spent summers with Queen Victoria's young children. Her initial contact with India through Duleep Singh and other rulers dispossessed by her government expanded into a geriatric fondness for India, manifest in her munshi Abdul Karim who taught her Urdu, and the addition of a Durbar Hall, to house her Indian collection of artefacts, gifts and commissioned paintings. The Hall was designed by J. Lockwood Kipling and Bhai Ram Singh, from Lahore's Mayo School of Arts (now the NCA).

Obtaining...