When Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni had announced the title of her latest novel on her Facebook page and asked fans to guess who the titular qu...
When Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni had announced the title of her latest novel on her Facebook page and asked fans to guess who the titular queen could be, the answers had ranged from Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi and Rani Chennamma of Karnataka to the Tuluva queen Abbakka Chowta of Ullal (present day Mangaluru), and even a vague “anyone from the family of Bahadur Shah Zafar”. So the Indian-American author’s decision to bring story of Rani Jindan Kaur of Punjab to the world as the heroine of her latest novel, The Last Queen, was a well-thought-out surprise.
The youngest and last wife of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, founder of the Sikh Empire, Jindan Kaur has found relatively less space in history books (like many other women leaders from the past). While there have been several works on kings and male heroes of the eras gone by, those on the important women of history have been rare. There’s Ira Mukhoty’s brilliant Daughters Of The Sun (2018) that brought the untold lives of Mughal women to the page, while her debut Heroines: Powerful Indian Women of Myth and History (2017) told us tales of the might of female leaders from Raziya Sultan to Meerabai.
The Women Who Ruled India (2019) by Archana Garodia Gupta...
