A bookstore in Sector 8, Chandigarh, made for an intimate and fitting setting recently as Chandigarh-based author Sakoon Singh stepped into conversation about her latest work, Fourteen Springs of Separation, a historical fiction that reaches back into the turbulent heartland of nineteenth-century Punjab. In dialogue with Dr Manpreet Kaur, a historian whose academic grounding lent the evening a sharp intellectual edge, Singh traced the emotional and political landscape that inspired the novel — one rooted in the final, fractured years of the Sikh Empire following the death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.
At the center of the story are two of history’s most compelling and overlooked figures: Maharani Jind Kaur, the last queen of the Lahore Durbar, and her son Duleep Singh, the boy-king who was stripped of his throne while still a child. Through a series of deliberate colonial machinations, the British engineered their separation — a rupture that would endure for fourteen long years. It is this wound that Singh’s novel sets out to examine, mourn, and ultimately honor.“What distinguishes the work,” Singh explained, “Is its layering of sources and perspectives. Drawing on the oral tradition of the Dhadi singers — the wandering balladists who kept alive the memory of Jind and Duleep with sympathy and song — the novel weaves folk narrative into its historical fabric, recovering voices that formal history has long since set aside. History is never just one story. It depends entirely on who is telling it, and why.“
To press that point further, the novel employs a contemporary frame: young characters in the present day grappling with the very same questions of memory, interpretation, and political bias as they attempt to reconstruct Jind and Duleep’s story. The device is thoughtful, it transforms the book from a straightforward period narrative into a meditation on how history is written, whose perspectives are centered, and what is lost when official accounts become the only accounts.The story moves fluidly across time and geography, from the gilded courts of Lahore to the drawing rooms of London, and through the quieter landscapes of Chandigarh, Pondicherry and Dharamsala, mirroring the displacement that defined its subjects’ lives.The evening drew a warm and engaged audience of academics, lawyers, students and working professionals, with questions from the floor reflecting the novel’s breadth, spanning colonial history, feminist readings of Jind Kaur’s agency, and the ethics of fictionalising real lives. The discussion concluded with a book signing, leaving many in the room, it seemed, reaching for a copy before the night was out.
