The Lost Heer: Women in Colonial Punjab by Harleen Singh Book Review

This is a book that fills a gap I did not fully appreciate existed until I started reading it. When I think about Punjabi history, I think of figures like Mai Bhago in the Guru period, then I jump to Maharaja Ranjit Singh's time and Maharani Jinda, and then there is a long jump before I land somewhere around Amrita Pritam. In between, there is roughly a hundred years where major female characters are almost entirely absent from the mainstream narrative.

The Lost Heer by Harleen Singh addresses that gap head on. It is a 544-page study that goes beyond male-centric narratives and brings together a fragmented archive to uncover the stories of Punjabi women across colonial Punjab, from widowed rulers who defied invaders and the British, to the folk songs, recipes and textiles that carried memory and resistance through a period of enormous change.

Harleen Singh is a writer and researcher based in Toronto, specialising in the social and literary history of colonial Punjab and the North West Frontier Province (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan). He is a grandchild of Partition refugees, all four of his grandparents moved from what is now Pakistan to Delhi. He did not grow up speaking Punjabi; Hindi was his first language. That sense of loss, of a culture that had been disrupted, runs through the book.

He founded The Lost Heer Project in 2018, dedicated to uncovering the largely forgotten narratives of women in colonial Punjab, and this book is the culmination of that work.

Breakdown

What is immediately striking about The Lost Heer is the sheer range of sources Harleen has drawn upon. In a period where most women were illiterate and could not write their own biographies, there is a huge lack of written material on women. So where do we find the stories?

Harleen's answer is everywhere, oral histories collected from the grandchildren of Partition refugees, folk songs in which women expressed their emotions and observations, textiles and embroideries that reflected the changing world women saw around them, recipes that provide a window into the introduction of new ingredients and cultural exchange, pension records where women who only existed as a Mrs. somebody or a Sardani somebody finally appear by name, women's magazines from the colonial period, men's memoirs that reference their mothers, daughters and sisters, early newspapers of Punjab including the Lahore Chronicle, and Persian records. It is, as Harleen describes it, like a puzzle, every piece of information was scattered, and the task was to bring everything together to find the story.

The book profiles both well-known and entirely forgotten women, including Aas Kaur, Mai Fatto and Bibi Sahib Kaur in the early colonial period, through to figures like Manmohini Zutshi and Raghbir Kaur, as well as completely forgotten individuals such as Dr Premdevi, who was probably the first qualified lady doctor of Punjab, and Khadija Begum Ferozeuddin, who was the first Punjabi lady MA. Vintage photographs of Punjab are included throughout.

The first chapter deals with a group of widowed chieftains, women who ruled small chieftaincies across Punjab and whose struggles became, as Harleen argues, gateways for British annexation. After these women died, a lot of their domains were annexed. Their struggle was not just against the British but against family members, neighbouring chieftains and invaders of various kinds. One figure that stands out is Rani Nurunissa of Raikot near Ludhiana.

Nurunissa was a contemporary of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. She came from a family of Rajput converts to Islam who were still proud of their Hindu ancestry, had pundits and purohits at their weddings, and maintained close ties with Sikh families including the Patiala, Nabha and Jind princely states. Her husband and son both died while hunting, leaving her as the sole ruler of her domain in a patriarchal society where everyone around her was eyeing her territories, including Ranjit Singh, who would cross the Sutlej every year and attempt to bully her into giving up her lands.

Nurunissa actually wrote letters to the British in Delhi, and Harleen suggests this was one of the first interactions he could find of a Punjabi woman engaging directly with a British official. Her name was pieced together from British correspondences, Persian records and the Lahore Chronicle, which reported on the mini war Nurunissa fought. To reconstruct her personality beyond the archive, Harleen used a technique he calls informed imagination — looking into the local traditions, the melas, the folk deities, and the customs of the region to situate Nurunissa within a fuller picture of who she might have been.

Another chapter that stands out is the one on Har Devi Rashin Lal, the first Punjabi female journalist. Har Devi was born and raised in Lahore and lived in strict purdah throughout her early life.

In 1886, her father decided to send his son to England to study but was worried that the young man might convert to Christianity, quoting the father, he feared his son would be taken away by a British witch. So the father married his son off before leaving and then decided to send his daughter-in-law along for company and, eventually, his daughter Har Devi as well. In England, Har Devi witnessed the jubilee of Queen Victoria, made friends amongst women's rights activists, and learned the Montessori system of education for kindergartners. 

When her father died, she returned to Punjab, set up the first printing press in Lahore and started the first women's magazine, Bharat Bhagini, which means the sisters of India. She also wrote a travelogue, which is significant because through it we learn what she and her sister and sister-in-law were actually feeling as they travelled to England — she writes with disdain about her fellow Punjabi women in purdah, urging them to get out and see the world. Har Devi later became a staunch loyalist, composing a eulogy for Queen Victoria upon her death in 1901. 

But five years later, when Bhagat Singh's uncle was imprisoned, she had a change of heart and became a nationalist, writing seditious pieces against the British Raj. The arc from progressive proto-feminist to loyalist to nationalist is a remarkable one and I am surprised that most of us do not know about her.

What I found particularly interesting is the way the book deals with sources that are not typically treated as historical evidence. Textiles, for instance. Harleen explains how khaddar — raw cotton — was something that every Punjabi woman manufactured at home. She would spin for hours on the charkha, the yarn would be given to the village weaver, and different grades of cloth were produced and distributed according to the importance of family members, with children usually receiving the lowest grade.

When the British began importing cotton from Manchester, the indigenous industries were destroyed, and women's embroidery patterns changed accordingly — you begin to see railways, men wearing hats, and other markers of colonial life appearing in the textiles. These embroideries give us an important glimpse into the minds of women who could not read and write.

Folk songs are treated with similar seriousness. When the Singh Sabha movement came to Punjab, early Singh Sabha men expected women to stop dancing, singing boliyan and doing giddha.

Women, most of whom could not write and therefore could not write protest articles or letters to newspapers, instead composed folk songs. One well-known song directly protests the Singh Sabha reforms. 

Similarly, Arya Samaji women composed songs protesting Arya Samaj men who were forcing women to abandon the fasts of Sharad. These folk songs were acts of resistance by women who had no other avenue of protest, and Harleen treats them as the primary sources they are.

Recipes, too, serve as historical evidence. Harleen traces how new ingredients entered Punjab, tomatoes, for instance, arrived via Bengal and were initially called vilayati baingan (foreign eggplant) in Punjabi.

Canned food arrived, tea arrived, and women's magazines began popularising the making of jellies, jams and marmalades using local fruits like the malta, a Punjabi orange. Recipes were not standardised; they varied from district to district, from pind to pind, and across socioeconomic backgrounds, but they provide a window into a changing world.

The broader argument of the book, which Harleen touches on particularly towards the final sections, is about how Punjabi women entered modernity. At the start of the 20th century, most women were in purdah and largely invisible on the streets, when you look at street photography from 19th-century Punjab, you barely find women, only men walking, with the only visible women being those from so-called lower castes or working women.

By the 1930s, women were pilots, they were MLAs, they were in many ways emancipated. And then in 1947, everything that had been achieved in the previous forty to fifty years was reversed, and women were treated terribly by the men of Punjab during Partition. That trajectory — from invisibility to emancipation to devastation — is one of the most important stories in Punjabi history and one that is almost never told.

Conclusion & Rating

The Lost Heer thoroughly deserves a 5 star rating. In 544 pages, Harleen Singh has produced a work that goes far beyond a simple recovery of lost names. It is a study that takes seriously the sources that women left behind, not written texts, for the most part, but songs, textiles, recipes, oral histories and scattered archival fragments — and uses them to reconstruct lives that would otherwise remain invisible. The range of figures covered, from widowed rulers to journalists to the unnamed women whose embroidery patterns recorded the arrival of the British, gives the book a depth and breadth that is difficult to find elsewhere.

If there is a criticism, it is that at 544 pages the book covers an enormous amount of ground and the reader occasionally has to work to keep track of the various women and periods being discussed. However, this is a really small criticism and one that speaks more to the richness of the material than to any fault in the writing. Furthermore, vintage photographs are included throughout, which helps to ground the narrative.

I had the privilege of speaking with Harleen on the podcast and what came across most strongly was the care and attention he has put into this work over the course of seven years. For anyone interested in Punjabi history, women's history, colonial history, or simply in understanding the lives that our mainstream narratives have left out, this is essential reading. Almost every page contains something that I did not know, and I suspect the same will be true for most readers.

Get your copy here.