She was built for the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company at the Harland and Wolff shipyard at Greenock on the lower River Clyde, Scotland in 1925.

She was requisitioned into the Royal Navy on the onset of World War II, outfitted in December 1939 at Yarrows, in Esquimalt, as an armed merchant cruiser and commissioned HMS Rajputana.

On 13 April 1941, four days after parting company with convoy HX 117, she was torpedoed by U-108 under Klaus Scholtz in the Denmark Strait west of Reykjavík, Iceland.

A total of 283 of her crew were saved by the destroyer HMS Legion and Polish ORP Piorun, some of them after spending twelve hours in overcrowded lifeboats.

Among the survivors was Daniel Lionel Hanington, who later become a rear admiral in the Royal Canadian Navy.