Heeroics

In 1799, Rani Nur-un-Nissa, the widowed chieftain of Raikot, near Ludhiana, was a prisoner in her own estate. The hostile forces of Sahib Singh Bedi held her son and chief hostage. She dashed off a letter to George Thomas, India’s only Irish raja, to rescue her. In return, she promised George one lakh rupees. Never “in history had a Punjabi female directly addressed or engaged a European in political matters”, writes Harleen Singh in his new book, ‘The Lost Heer: Women in Colonial Punjab’. She changed the course of history.

Nur was not the only woman in Punjab with ambition. It was the same year when Sada Kaur, mother-in-law of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, promised her daughter to him despite him killing her husband. She jumped on horseback with Ranjit to snatch Lahore from the Bhangi Misl. Moran Sarkar, a dancing girl in Amritsar, married the Lion of Punjab and took troops to stake claim to Ferozepur bestowed to her as a jagir. She wasn’t successful, but she did try.

These were not quiet women. They plotted, they connived, they always wanted more. The history of Punjab has always been the story of brave men. But ‘The Lost Heer’ has only women. In 500-plus pages, Singh crams in a universe populated with women in colonial Punjab — Ghadarites like Gulab Kaur, writers, Sufis, doctors: Premdevi, believed to be the first Punjabi woman to get a degree; the first pilot, but also ordinary women who lived through history but have been left out of it.

“Why should women feel shame before women?” an old Punjabi woman bathing naked in a public bathhouse in Lahore asked an embarrassed Ramabai Ranade in 1886. Ramabai, the wife of Justice Ranade — a founding member of the Indian National Congress (INC) — was no stranger to radical views on the liberation of women. Her husband had caused quite a stir in Punjab with his views. But seeing women “all in nature’s garb” rubbing themselves with curd and Multani mitti sans clothes was too much for her. She entered the tank demurely wrapped in a cloth, only to be told off by the old woman: “You aren’t under the impression, are you, that you get clean when you bathe with your clothes on?”

Ramabai, writes Harleen, was not the first to be shocked by Punjabi women’s bathing habits. Colonel Wade, on his way from Ludhiana to Lahore in 1844, witnessed a “party of grown-up women” bathing naked but his presence did not “seem at all to disconcert them”.

Ramabai’s encounter sparked off an uproar. The bathing practices of women came up at a meeting of the INC in Lahore in 1893. As Harleen writes, women in Punjab had been bathing in the buff for centuries till the British came and the sight of “naked Punjaban flouted the ideas of Victorian morality”.

The question asked by the old Punjaban, “None of us are men, are we?”, is the background score in the book. Singh has turned the gaze to create the world of women. Some will remain unnamed, like the old Punjaban who quizzed Ramabai, or the author of Seemantini Updesh (Message to Women), out in February 1882, that began with “an almost blasphemous taunt” to God: ‘O Father of the Universe! Have you not created us?… It seems since your devotees imagine you in the masculine form, you have become be-rahm (cruel).’

Harleen has retrieved women from their petitions to the Company, from folklore, from footnotes, to have names to take, to remember, to cherish, to hold, to celebrate — no small feat, breaking the silence to create a cacophony. But others did not exist in public memory. They were advocates for equal opportunities, like Zainab Khatun, who, stifled by the strict purdah, made a representation to Syed Ahmed Khan to promote female education among Muslims.

Narindra Kumari, the granddaughter of Chattar Singh Attariwala, abandoned purdah by the 1890s and promoted inter-dining among Sikhs of different castes, which was revolutionary at the time.

Hardevi, born in Lahore in 1858, a widow at 16 or 17, crossed the kala pani to accompany her brother and his family to Britain, improved her English, found love and came back to start her own Hindi magazine, Bharat Bhagini. She was hailed by The Pall Mall Gazette as India’s first “Punjabee lady” editor.

Harleen’s book is littered with these stories — the kind that you want to gather to repeat, because in reclaiming the stories lies their power.

They are the kind of women that deserve, to borrow the title of Chandigarh-based poet Amy Singh’s fresh off-the-shelf book, ‘Singing Over Bones’. It’s a rare April, two brilliant books that expand the tiny Punjab bookshelf.

If Harleen explores the land of five rivers, Amy explores the other side of loss — of her home, of the personal and inherited. The title is taken from a story from Dr Clarissa Pinkola’s book ‘Women Who Run With Wolves’. La Loba, the wolf woman, gathers the bones of wolves to sing them to life. The stories of the Heers that were lost, need to be sung too. “With collective repair,” Amy said at the release of her book in Delhi recently, “you can bring it alive. Living became a process of creative repair.”

Her poem ‘Daak: To Lahore with Love’ went viral, sparking a letter-writing frenzy across borders. Filled with longing, Amy writes of loss with such passion that her loss is palpable. “This morning I woke up to Lahore radio paying tribute to Mehdi Hassan. So, I quickly took out a postcard from my collection and wrote: Kis kis ko batayenge judai ka sabab hum. Tu mujhse khafa hai to zamaane ke liye aa,” she writes.

If ‘The Lost Heer’ offers a list of women who are proof of Punjab’s composite identity, Amy’s book is a knockout-punch of loss. ‘In Which Prayer Exhausts Itself into Poetry — About an Abusive Relationship’ reads: “He, Adam; I, the lamb./ We go to the same church, but his God/ doesn’t answer my calls.”

Her poetry explores loss — personal, her mother dying, her uncle, her grandmothers, she herself in an abusive relationship, as well as what she carries as inherited. This loss is real and overwhelming, as much hers as that of the women who kept it alive in the folk songs. Amy writes: “When you do not know who you are, you start to figure out where you come from.” She says: “Your parents, your ancestors, your history, Partition. [To question] why is this pain that I am carrying feeling deeper than [just mine].”

Till now, Waris Shah’s Heer was alone with her pain. The other Heers existed, but privately. Harleen has provided a sisterhood. And Amy wants us to sing over their bones to conjure them up again.

— The writer is a literary critic

Features