‘The Last Queen’: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel resurrects the history of Jindan Kaur of Punjab
Fiction is the medium of a saga of a woman that history has not given enough importance to. Jindan Kaur | By George Richmond / Public Domain
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,