Educated at Bancroft’s School and King’s College, London, where she earned a graduate degree in English, Anita Anand launched a career as a radio and TV presenter and broadcaster in England. She began her career as the European Head of News and Current Affairs for Zee TV -- being the youngest news editor in Britain at the age of 25. She presented the talk show The Big Debate and Raj Britannia -- a series of 31 documentaries on Zee TV -- followed by a slot on BBC Radio 5 Live that carried on until October 2007. In addition, she has presented BBC Radio 4 Show Mid Week, Heaven and Earth Show, and co-presented Daily Politics on BBC 2 with Andrew Neil.

Anand has written countless articles and columns, and most importantly, the book Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary about the Indian princess Sophia Duleep Singh, granddaughter of Maharajah Ranjit Singh. Published in 2015, the book is about the life and times of the latter-day princess born in exile in England, who went on to struggle for causes including the Independence, the welfare of the Indian soldiers in First World War and women’s suffrage.

In this interview conducted on the occasion of the Lahore Literary Festival 2016, she defends tv journalism and the social media, her passion for women’s rights and the making of Sophia, the biography of a princess.

The News on Sunday (TNS): You were born in the UK but your parents were born here. Do you have any recollection of their earlier memories?

Anita Anand (AA): My ancestors came from what is now Pakistan. My father’s family was from Kalabagh, and my mother’s from Rawalpindi and Lahore. I was born in the UK, so I am British Asian. But I am an Urdu speaker, and my tayaji writes only in Urdu to this day.

There was a lot of love for this place and its people. Likewise, my mother’s side -- my baooji and my grandfather told stories about growing up here.

TNS: You’ve presented a number of talk shows on television. While on the one hand, talk shows provide a platform to the general public to propound their ideas while on the other the plethora of opinions can often lead to confusion and mayhem. How do you think journalists shape people’s views?

AA: It’s no journalist’s job to shape your thoughts. If somebody tries to do that, he is acting like a dictator and not a journalist. In my opinion, in the kind of shows I do, sometimes there’s a lot more heat than light in this genre. The ones that I do are normally more penetrable in nature. I think it’s alright to be fluid and always open to what people articulate. What worries me is when there’s a crazy tribalism, when your views are so trenchant that you cannot possibly entertain that there’s even another point of view, let alone engage with it.

If, in a way, you ask me what is it that I do, I create a safe space in the middle, and I referee between ideas. If you are on twitter, people who are like-minded tend to follow you; if you are on facebook, you select your friends; if you are on snapchat, you create your own communities. We are building walls around ourselves and our opinions. The more you hear your opinions reflected to you, the more you believe you are utterly unassailable. And the moment you believe that, you are an idiot.

The thing is, in the golden days of politics in the subcontinent, it used to be so that Left and Right would sit together. They may have despised what each other thought, but they would sit and argue about it, and somewhere in the middle of that they would have the same policy or at least the common sense that every country is made up of two halves. If you have no knowledge about it, you are an ignorant generation.

Politically speaking, there are those who don’t listen, and are politically decapitated. They were shocked in England when they heard about the way the elections went purely due to the fact that the politicians had not listened to the people. The number of times you had election results would take everybody’s breath away because you are not listening to the people. And sometimes it’s really hard to listen to people who you’ve got to believe because you must.

TNS: In one of your interviews, you’ve professed yourself to be a feminist. What is your stance vis-à-vis feminism?

AA: I am a feminist, and I hope you are too. I don’t know why you wouldn’t be? I think that throughout history, the countries which have suffered the most (and that means economically, culturally) and have experienced great violence are those which have oppressed and suppressed their women -- their daughters, their mothers, their sisters, etc. I believe very firmly in giving power to women, and I am talking about ‘equality’. People tend to think of feminism as the ‘f’ word, that it’s dirty. There’s nothing to be frightened of. All I am saying is everybody requires an equal shot. Women, in this world, have been disadvantaged for a very long time. So, I am all for helping women. I believe very much that women should have a voice, they should have equal rights, and they should have the right to participate in a democracy.

TNS: How do you weigh words against actions to bring about a change in the way people think and act?

AA: Well, it’s always actions! I read this book about the suffragettes very recently. They had a slogan: "Deeds, not words!" which is as relevant today as it was back then. In their day, it was to give women a presence in the political process, and I would say, even today, it’s about giving women a role in the political process. You can pay lip service to it. You can wave around the fact that in your country and mine we had women prime ministers. Let’s scratch a little deeper than that and look at the participation in politics, and not just those people who are standing and putting themselves forward but also those people who turn around the ballot box to vote. That’s the situation where deeds not words matter.

TNS: Why would you think literature could make a difference by turning the tables round?

AA: Words are more powerful than police. If that were not the case, dictators would not close down centres of free thought. They wouldn’t throw writers and poets in prisons; they wouldn’t have them lurk on the streets or sentenced to death. Words are about ideas; literature is about ideas and passion and connectivity. You were talking about words and actions, head and heart. Literature is a synapse between these two names. Without stirring the thought, you are not going to be spurred into any kind of action. Literature is not something that’ll sit on a shelf. It is something living and vibrant, and about participating in a conversation. It is like talk shows I told you about where you often sit with somebody you might not agree with. I love being among people I know I am not going to agree with because it’s challenging, it’s like having your brain pummeled into some kind of a shape because you fight back as well. So, I think words are not inert.

TNS: How did you get introduced to Sophia -- the heroine of your biography?

AA: I didn’t find Sophia, she found me! I was on maternity leave. After having done two daily live shows for a few years (a television show in the morning and a radio show in the evening), I was just used to a high amount of work. When I was on leave, everything changed. With the baby, I was reading anything and everything I could put my hands on -- newspapers, books and things that were quiet -- cereal packets, tins and ingredients. I read more than I had ever read before. And a local magazine that normally I wouldn’t pick up and by instinct would chuck into recycling, I read it, cover to cover.

Now there was one photograph in that magazine about a local suffragette exhibition, and it had one picture of a woman selling a very militant suffragette newspaper outside Hampton Court Palace, which is a weird but striking picture. And even though it was black and white, I knew she was Asian. And not just Asian, I knew she was Punjabi. I said to myself she looks like my aunt. She’d got features I could recognise. How is it possible that there was an Indian suffragette and a political journalist, an Indian by origin? I am Punjabi. How ashamed am I that I don’t know her by looks and name -- turned out her name is Singh; I am married to a Singh.

It was out of shame that our relationship started. It was born utterly in shame. So I thought I’ll find a book about her but there was hardly anything out there. As a journalist, it became an obsession. Sometimes you just have an itch, you can’t stop scratching. You don’t know whether you’d be left with a bleeding stump at the end of it. So I spent the next three and a half years trying to find this woman.

Some things are really easy to find out. What was immediately clear was that she was Ranjit Singh’s granddaughter, (we are sitting in Lahore -- the seat of Ranjit Singh’s power), her father was Duleep Singh, they had the Koh-e-Noor diamond and they lost it, and then suddenly, there’s a blank. With the children of Duleep Singh, there’s hardly anything because they were born in Britain like I was.

Then I started looking into newspaper cuttings as I would as a journalist, and I found two very different sets: about a socialite loved by the British aristocracy, a fashion icon, a champion dog breeder, and a sportswoman. And another set where she was detested and hated, and called a traitor to her country. I don’t know how these two things married together. That’s really what the book is about.

TNS: How did you carry out research?

AA: I started with the newspapers -- they gave me pointers to archive. The British Library had a conservatory of Duleep Singh’s papers. Nobody had ever looked at the children’s papers. Letters of the daughters to each other were there. There was a diary of Sophia’s, which was amazing. Then I went to places where she had lived. And because this is quite recent history -- it wasn’t too long ago when women did not have the vote, there are living links. Suddenly, I was finding people who knew her and they were still alive. So, I found one of her maids who’d worked at the Hampton Court when she was a 14 year-old girl who could tell me so much: the way she laughed, the way she smelt, etc. And then she went to war to live with her. It was piece by piece, putting this missing person together.

Then, of course, when you are doing this kind of research, you find out why no book had ever been written about her. The British made a real conscious attempt to delete her from history because they found what she did was offensive to their sensibilities. They dissed her as an upstart Indian who’d been given this fantastic privilege in life by Queen Victoria. She is very civil in our face by joining the suffragettes. They wanted to punish her. And, also they didn’t want the message to get back to Punjab, particularly to Lahore.

TNS: How would you sum up Sophia’s multi-faceted personality?

AA: She lived four lifetimes in the space of one life. That’s why she is so infuriating and curious: she is a socialite princess, a suffragette princess, a war nurse, and an icon of resistance. And in all of these, she’s a fighter for justice in every single aspect of her life. She had a pointless start in life when she was a vacuous socialite, when all that she cared about was herself and her clothes and the way she lived and people she was seen with. But all that disappeared when she came to Lahore. Actually, Lahore changed her completely.

She adored Bamba, her sister. Bamba was such a strident woman that people loathed her. I found it very difficult to find anybody who had a good word to say about her. Of all these living people who knew the sisters, nobody had a nice word to say about Bamba. Also if you look through the historical records, there are files and files that are deeply critical and cruel about Bamba. But Sophia loved her and was completely loyal to her. Bamba thought that Sophia was crazy, fighting for these British women.

Sophia’s sensibilities were very much caught up with the Indian struggle for Independence, and she kept telling her sister to come settle here but she won’t understand why. She had a kinship with the English. What I love about her is that even though she loved Bamba so much, she would keep to her own opinion. They didn’t agree about these fundamentals yet they bumped along together.

When Sophia died, Bamba was in her eighties. She took this last trip to bring her ashes back to Punjab and scatter them here.