CENTRE FOR STUDIES OF HOME ANNUAL LECTURE

The English country house stands as an icon of English national identity, carefully preserved and publically displayed by cultural organisations such as English Heritage and the National Trust. This lecture explores the life and successive homes of the Maharaja Duleep Singh (1838-1893) to re-position that nationalist history in a broader global context. Declared ruler of the kingdom of Lahore as a child of five, Duleep Singh came under the protection of the English East India Company at the end of the First Anglo-Sikh War (1845-46) but lost his throne to the British at the conclusion of the Second Anglo-Sikh War (1848-49). Deprived of his palaces in the Punjab, Duleep Singh travelled to Britain, where he resided in a succession of Scottish castles before purchasing an English country house, Elveden (in Suffolk). The Maharaja's Many Mansions: Duleep Singh and the 19th-century Country House Tradition asks what Duleep Singh's domestic dislocations can tell us about the 'Englishness'of the English country house tradition.

 

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