Book challenges silence around women role in colonial Punjab

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 train ended up enabling greater female mobility.