December

Over 200 years, British trade in Indian textiles and the Empire's eventual control of India's market, through colonisation, conquest, enslavement and industrialisation, played a key role in shaping British Indian relations. This artwork explores one of the many legacies of that complex and often difficult relationship: namely, Britain's rich multicultural character.

As a celebration of the positive impact of South-Asians (notably Punjabis) on British society, it incorporates the figure of Sophia Duleep Singh - the British born Indian Princess, suffragette and WWI nurse, whose heritage and personal life relate to the history of cotton, as part of the wider interconnected story of Indian textiles, slavery and Empire. Sophia was not only of Punjabi-Sikh descent but also European and African. Her maternal grandparents were a German cotton trading, merchant banker, and an Abyssinian slave. She was the daughter of Maharaja Duleep Singh - the deposed ruler of the Sikh Empire who was converted to Christianity and exiled to England as a young boy after the British East Indian Company conquered his domains. This ancestral land of Sophia was one of the valuable regions of textile handicraft manufacture and cotton cultivation exploited by the British Raj.