Dr Priya Atwal looks beyond Ranjit Singh himself to recover the queens and princes who helped shape the Sikh Empire and its rise and fall.
In late eighteenth-century India, the glory of the Mughal emperors was fading, and ambitious newcomers seized power. Enter Maharajah Ranjit Singh, whose Sikh Empire stretched throughout north-western India into Afghanistan and Tibet.
Dr Atwal shines fresh light on this long-lost kingdom, looking beyond its founding father to restore the queens and princes to the story of the empire’s rise and fall. She traces a self-made ruling family shaped by Sikh, Mughal and European ideas of power, before the empire succumbed to gendered family politics and British expansion.
Dr Priya Atwal is the Community History Fellow at the University of Oxford, where she is building a new hub for ethical, innovative community-university partnership projects. Her academic research focuses on empire, monarchy and cultural politics across nineteenth-century Britain and South Asia.
Her first book, Royals and Rebels: The Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire, was published in 2020. She also works as a historical consultant and has collaborated with Historic Royal Palaces, among others.
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