The Lost Homestead: My Mother, Partition and the Punjab

In this gripping memoir, Marina Wheeler tells the story of her mother’s early years shaped by the Partition and her subsequent search for personal and political freedom.

Marina Wheeler

Marina Wheeler QC is a British lawyer, author and columnist. As a barrister, she specialises in public law, including human rights, and is a member of the Bar Disciplinary Tribunal. She was appointed Queen's Counsel in 2016. She was educated at the European School of Brussels, and then in the early 1980s at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where she wrote for the student magazine Cantab. Marina’s ancestry via her mother, Dip Singh, is rooted in the city of Sargodha in West Punjab, present-day Pakistan, with her maternal family migrating to present-day India after the Partition of India.

In conversation with Kavita Puri, Marina Wheeler joins the UKPHA Bookclub to tell the story of her mother’s early years shaped by the Partition and her subsequent search for personal and political freedom. In this gripping family memoir, The Lost Homestead, touches on global themes that strongly resonate today: political change, religious extremism, migration, minorities, nationhood, identity and belonging. But above all, it is about coming to terms with the past, and about the stories we choose to tell about ourselves.

Buy 'The Lost Homestead: My Mother, Partition and the Punjab' here >>

Prof Priya Satia

Prof Priya Satia, from Stanford University, joins the UKPHA Bookclub to describe the alternative futures anticolonial thinkers continued to imagine as the new border was drawn, especially through the poetic idioms of Urdu and Punjabi.

Kavita Puri

Kavita Puri joins the UKPHA Bookclub in conversation with Jassa Ahluwalia, to talk about her critically acclaimed BBC Radio 4 series ‘Three Pounds in my Pocket’, which has charted the social history of British South Asians over four seasons, decade by decade covering the 1960’s to 2000’s.

Gurmeet Rai

Gurmeet is one of India’s most renowned conservation architect's, who has been internationally recognised, most notably by UNESCO, for her work. Gurmeet talks about her 20 year engagement with the city of Amritsar to conserve some of it's historic buildings.

Prof. Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh

Prof. Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh talks about her work on the Janamsakhis to explore Guru Nanak's portrayal in art and his message on environmentalism.

See All Events

UKPHA VIRTUAL BOOK CLUB