The Lost Heer is a collection of women’s voices from colonial Punjab of 1849–1947 whose stories are a homage to Heer, the symbol of a quintessential Punjaban – rebellious, brave, and daring. The Punjaban who dares to fall in love in a medieval patriarchal Punjab, elope with her lover despite being ‘married’ to another man, and stand up against the court for her love. Heer’s courageous spirit that shapes history is what The Lost Heer attempts to highlight by documenting the stories of Heer’s sisters: nameless women whose contribution has shaped our present world would have been much different.

Harleen has put together a collection of photographs and stories by combining years of cataloguing oral histories and anecdotes, scouring through personal archives and museum/library archives, and interviewing real accounts of fortitude. Despite the history of most Punjabi women of that time being documented through the names of their fathers or husbands, Harleen has taken help of old magazines, newspapers, personal histories, and records to thoroughly corroborate these stories.

Some of these stories include that of Hardevi Roshan Lal, the first Punjabi woman to start her magazine and write a travelogue; Syeda Muhammadi Begum, the first woman editor in Punjab to publish a women’s weekly newspaper; Meena Shorey (Khursheed Jahan), a young woman who shot to fame as the ‘Larra Lappa’ girl due to the hit song by the same title in 1949’s Ek Thi Larki; and Sarla Thakral, the first Punjabi woman in India to qualify as a pilot after flying between Karachi and Lahore in 1936.