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By Ritika Sharma
In Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch remarks that "we never really understand a person until we consider things from their point of view, until we climb inside their skin and walk around in it". Perhaps, this is what Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni intends when she retells stories of the past from women's perspective.
Divakaruni has narrated the lives of mythical characters of Sita and Draupadi with diligence in the past. In her latest novel, The Last Queen, she writes the travails of a relatively recent queen, Punjab's Jindan Kaur. While we have a rich literature on the warrior men from Punjab of the 19th century, women have not got a fair deal. Divakaruni corrects the anomaly as she focuses on the favourite and last queen of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who displayed the traits of both her husband and his son Daleep Singh. While Ranjit was a fierce braveheart, the son was a gullible man trapped in the machinations of British.
Jindan was a rare queen...