A quick look at Maharani Amrit Kaur’s (1904–1948) black-and-white photograph of Mandi reveals a composed woman wearing a saree, with her head tastefully framed by her pallu. Beyond the fragile façade, however, is the secret tale of a Sikh princess whose quiet resistance and inner courage inspire adoration.

Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of the princely kingdom of Kapurthala was the father of Amrit Kaur. After attending a pioneering all-girls boarding school in Eastbourne, England, she married Joginder Sen Bahadur, the Raja of Mandi, at Jagatjit Palace in Kapurthala in 1923. Together, they have two kids.

A 1927 article in the New York Herald Tribune said that Amrit Kaur wanted to help underprivileged and disenfranchised women.

However, once her husband married a second woman in the 1930s, Amrit Kaur left for Europe. She leaves behind her children. She reportedly lived in the United States for a while before going back to Europe at the start of World War II. The Gestapo, the covert police of Nazi Germany and its conquered countries, detained her on December 8, 1940. In order to aid Jewish individuals in their escape, she had sold her jewelry.

Torn between interest and dislike, Anita Delgado, from her residence in Madrid, maintained a close watch on India’s independence struggle, according to author Elisa Vázquez de Gey’s book Anita Delgado, Maharani de Kapurthala. However, she was severely affected when she learned, a year later, of the untimely death of Amrit Kaur, the daughter of the Maharaja of Kapurthala. Once a close friend of Delgado, Kaur was a kindhearted person who sold all of her jewelry in 1940 to help Jewish intellectuals who were escaping France. Despite frantic diplomatic and political attempts to rescue her, she was taken by the Gestapo and brought to a German concentration camp, where she passed away two years later.