Grandma's tales and the colonial Punjab women

If it had not been "Bibi" then perhaps the stories of women in colonial Punjab would never have been told in vivid detail and in the authentic voice of a woman who has been there and has seen and felt it all.

- Nirupama Dutt

If it had not been "Bibi" then perhaps the stories of women in colonial Punjab would never have been told in vivid detail and in the authentic voice of a woman who has been there and has seen and felt it all. Now you will ask who this Bibi is? She happens to be the late maternal grandmother of a scholar-author Harleen Singh whose one-of-a-kind book with a curious title lies on my computer table as I struggle for ways and means to share with you in not a single word more than seven hundred of this fortnightly column.

Now it all started, as the author says, in a big-fat Punjabi wedding in Delhi in December 2012 when he heard his grandma and other older women singing the traditional Punjabi 'Suhag' which seemed to his young years monotonous with voices of the women in discord as compared to the contemporary vibrant Punjabi music that he had heard as a boy post the Gurdas Maan era.

Conversations with his grandma led him to the pre-Partition colonial era when men and women lived in different worlds under the same roof including his Bibi who hailed from rural Sheikhupura, then in West Punjab and now in Pakistan. Chats with his "nani" led him to the secluded lives of women of those times when they had only distant-formal relationships even with their fathers.

Bibi's revelations haunted him even when he went for higher studies to Canada. He realised that those times meant two worlds, the world of men of the house and the world of the women.