The Lost Heer: Harleen Singh gives the long-ignored women of Punjab a voice

To Singh's credit is his depth of research-an achievement made all the more remarkable given the paucity of archival material
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The Lost Heer: Women in Colonial Punjab
by Harleen Singh
Published by Penguin
544 pages: ₹1,299
The narratives of Punjab have often been constructed through the prisms of empire, masculinity, and political sovereignty, leaving little space for the textured, and often silenced experiences of its women. In The Lost Heer Harleen Singh undertakes the task of reorienting this gaze, recovering from the margins the unnamed and forgotten heers eclipsed by the dominant masculinist historical imagination. Drawing on archival material, memoirs, periodicals, and lesser-known biographical fragments, Singh assembles a rich mosaic of female subjectivities spanning class, religion, and so on. The result is

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