India, April 19 -- 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 you...