Challenging silences around women in Punjab’s past

In the late 18th century, Akar Kaur of Patiala rallied forces against Maratha incursions using guerrilla tactics to defend her territory. Women from Raikot sought British support to safeguard their territories.

These and similar stories of women missing from mainstream history surfaced on Friday at a discussion on a new book, “The Lost Heer: Women in Colonial Punjab”, at Bhai Vir Singh Sahitya Sadan here.

Authored by Canada-based Harleen Singh, the Penguin publication recentres women in the history of Punjab.

Former Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) professor Gurpreet Mahajan, speaking at the event, emphasised how such episodes illustrated the diversity of women’s roles in Punjab’s history.

“They were not just resisting or just conforming. Their actions depended on circumstance — sometimes they fought, sometimes they negotiated,” she said.

Singh’s book, over 400 pages with 50 pages of endnotes, spans nearly two centuries of archival records, newspapers, journals and oral histories. It is, as Mahajan put it, both a rigorous historical account and a resource for future researchers.

It challenges the silence around women in Punjab’s past. “Patriarchy ensures women’s absence from history everywhere,” Mahajan said, pointing to parallels in 19th-century Europe, where women writers like George Eliot published under male pseudonyms and universities restricted women from authority.

The book also examines women’s encounters with colonial institutions and missionary work. While cultural barriers limited direct interaction, joint initiatives such as schools and colleges took root, expanding opportunities for girls’ education and even creating pathways into professions like medicine.

Sometimes these changes were unplanned. For instance, women-only compartments in trains—introduced to ease discomfort—ended up enabling greater female mobility, reshaping horizons.

Similarly, missionary admiration for phulkari helped popularise it abroad but also stripped it of its communal and ritual context.

Singh, who first explored these themes through an archival project during the pandemic, said, “The book grew out of questions about why women were missing from Punjab’s visual and textual records.” He asked, “Even in photographs of bazaars or processions, women are absent. Where were they?”

His own family’s Partition memories, carried by his grandmothers, provided the personal spark for the search.

Yet Singh admitted to wrestling with doubts about his role. “I kept asking myself—how can I, a man, write about women? Would I do justice to their stories?” That hesitation, he explained, forced him to slow down and listen more closely to oral testimonies and most often overlooked details in archives.

Beyond documenting women’s agency, the book captures broader features of Punjabi society: how purdah was class-specific, how bazaar women were marginalised by reform movements, how practices like female infanticide left enduring imbalances, and how religious coexistence shaped everyday life. She cited the example of Nurul Nisaan, a Muslim woman proud of her Hindu ancestry and custodian of Sikh artefacts, as emblematic of Punjab’s shared cultural fabric.

Academic Patricia O’Brien, chair of the discussion said, “When I entered Punjabi society through marriage, I found it already fractured — along caste lines, along cultural lines, along gendered expectations. My father-in-law and my mother-in-law, both from very different traditions, embodied those fault lines within the family itself.” These two strands were not at war, but they were rarely in agreement — not even in the world of women. That tension reflected something larger about Punjabi culture,” she added.

Writer Amandeep Sandhu said the book documents women’s resistance against the walls of colonialism, feudalism and patriarchy.