RAF Hero, Mohinder Singh Pujji

I was reading the excellent blog Spitalfields Life, in which the Gentle Author had a day out in Gravesend - where he found this statue (picture taken from Wikipedia):

Mohinder Singh Pujji was a commercial pilot before the Second World War, and one of the first pilots to volunteer with the Royal Indian Air Force to come to Britain. He flew Hurricanes just after the Battle of Britain, and later flew in the Middle East. He was awarded the DFC during his service in Burma for flying reconnaissance missions over Japanese territory, often in monsoon conditions, to bring back information about Japanese troop movements.
After the war, and a bout of TB that ended his military career, he worked at the Safdarjung Aerodrome in Delhi, and after his retirement he moved to Britain, finally living in Gravesend. In 2000, he was made an honorary Freeman of the Borough of Newham.

In 2005 he protested the use of the image of a Spitfire by the BNP in their leaflets, saying:
"The BNP are wrong to use the Spitfire as representative of their party. They forget people from different backgrounds helped in the Second World War. I am proof of this - I was flying a Spitfire. I also met Winston Churchill. Even in those days, there were ethnic minorities fighting for the British."

Partly because of his comments, the Royal Air Force Museum at Cosford mounted a permanent exhibition in 2009 called Diversity in the Royal Air Force - Mohinder Singh Pujji was guest of honour at the opening.
He died of a stroke in 2010, aged 92.
The statue was erected in 2014.

Asian Victorians - Prince Duleep Singh and his Family

Because people from all around the world came to live in Victorian Britain, not just black people.

Years ago, I visited Thetford, mostly for the fine motte and to see the places that had been the scenes of outdoor location shooting for Dad's Army - despite being nowhere near the sea, Thetford was actually Walmington-on-Sea!
And near the river, we came upon a statue of a Sikh Prince.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ADalip_Singh_Statue_-_Thetford.jpg

Prince Duleep Singh lived near to Thetford, at Elvedon Estate (now owned by the Guinness family). Before that he had lived in Yorkshire and Scotland, where he was known as the Black Prince of Perthshire. Although he lived the life of an aristocrat, and became the fourth best shot in England (apparently) in game shooting circles, he was not living in England by choice.

At the age of five, he was declared Maharajah of the Sikh Empire, after four of his predecessors were assassinated. After the First Anglo-Sikh War, he and his mother were imprisoned by the British, and at the age of fifteen he was sent to England. Queen Victoria befriended him, but he was separated from his mother for thirteen years, when she was allowed to come to England to be with him for the last two years of her life. He visited India only twice - once to be re-united with his mother, Maharani Jind Kaur, and once to scatter her ashes. He attempted to return to India in 1886, but only got as far as Aden, where he was arrested and sent back to Britain.
He died in Paris, at the age of 55, and is buried in Elvedon Church, beside his wife Bamba and his son Edward Albert Duleep Singh. In his youth, he converted to Christianity, but later (while at Aden on his way back to India) re-converted to Sikhism.

Prince Duleep Singh married twice - he and Bamba Muller had six children, and his second wife Ada Douglas Wetherill had two children. None of the eight children had legitimate children of their own, ending the line of the Sikh royal family. Princes Victor and Frederick went to Eton in the 1870s.
He met Bamba, the daughter of a German banker and a Coptic slave, in Egypt on his way back from scattering his mother's ashes, and they were married in Alexandria.
Ada was supposed to be a French princess, but was actually the Prince's mistress, who went to join him in Paris when he abandoned his first family. This was after his failed attempt to return to India. Ada was with him when he travelled to St Petersburg to try to persuade the Czar to invade India from the north and re-install him as ruler.

One of the most interesting of his children was Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, who became a suffragette. She lived in a "grace and favour" house at Hampton Court, and visited India in 1907. When she came back, she turned her attention to women's suffrage as an associate of Mrs Pankhurst, and the aid of the Indian soldiers during the First World War. She worked as a nurse among the Indian wounded soldiers in Brighton.
She died in 1948, and her ashes were scattered in India.