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 >>
You May also be interested in:

Dr Nadhra Kahn

The Sikh ruler Maharaja Ranjit Singh (1799-1839) died ten years before the British annexation of the Punjab in 1849. his funerary monument or samadhi is located next to the Lahore fort, where the Maharaja lived. The structure is the last state funded project of the Lahore Darbar and represents a high point of nineteenth-century Sikh architecture, second only to the Golden Temple in Amritsar.

George Morton-Jack

Historian George Morton-Jack, author of 'The Indian Empire at War' - drawing on long-lost Indian veteran interviews and oral memories in India and Pakistan to explore neglected personal stories of 1914-1918

Sathnam Sanghera

Award-winning journalist, author and presenter Sathnam Sanghera speaks with reporter-filmmaker Amandeep Kaur Bhangu about his writing, journalism and TV work.

William Dalrymple

Historian William Dalrymple joins the UKPHA Bookclub in conversation with actor and filmmaker Jassa Ahluwalia to discuss two hundred years of tumultuous colonial history, covert political machinations and bloody resistance.

See All Events