Dalip Singh was exiled to Britain in 1853. Dr John Login and Lady Login were to be his wards and life long friends. Under their influence, he embraced Christianity, a persuasion he was to regret and renounce in his later life. However, even as Dalip grew up in Britain, he married and had a family, but he never forsake his faith in Sikhism and his longing and love for Punjab. The Sikhs of Aden (Saudi Arabia) consecrated him back to Sikhism while on his way to India, where the Sikhs of Punjab who denounced him as their ruler refused him entry. This attitude of the loyal British Sikhs very much disappointed the Maharaja.

His mother, exiled in Nepal, was to join him in London in 1861. He went to Calcutta for holidays in 1860 and from there he went to see his mother and bring her to England. She lived for over a year with him, first in his residence then looked after by English ladies in London. She died in London, still awaiting settlement of her claims for pension and other royal heritage. He took the remains of his mother to Bombay and submerged the ashes in the River Narbada. On the way back at Cairo, he met his future wife, Miss Bamba, attached to American Mission in the city. She joined him in Elveden, where they had six children.

Maharani Jindan

In 1861 Dalip Singh returned to India to rescue his mother from political exile in Nepal, bringing her to London where she died in 1863. On the journey back from taking her body to India for cremation, Dalip Singh met Bamba Muller, an Arabic-speaking girl whose mother was an Abyssinian Christian and father a German banker, she became his wife in 1864.