Three Women of Amritsar

A Women's Day memoir from the city that raised me, and the women who shaped what it meant to grow up inside it

Published on Women's Day, 8 March 2026 — kpsgill.com

I left Amritsar in May 2007 knowing I was not coming back the way I had left it. That is the knowledge every young Punjabi carries to the airport — the certainty that return, when it comes, will be shaped by everything that has changed in the interval, and that what you are really carrying out of Punjab is not luggage but formation. The things that made you. The city that produced you. The schools, the streets, the institutional figures who lodged themselves in childhood memory before you had the language to fully describe what they were doing there.

I was going to the United States to begin training. I would start at UAMS in Little Rock, Arkansas — a long way, in every sense, from Fatehgarh Churian Road, Amritsar, where I had spent the better part of a decade and a half being educated. The first day of my training would be the first day of a life organized entirely by American institutional rhythms. But the formation that would allow me to survive and eventually to flourish in those American institutions had been built elsewhere. In a classroom. At an assembly. Near a school gym on an open stage. On the road between home and Pingalwara, where a woman in white was always, in some sense, standing.

This piece is about three of the women who built that formation. It is written on Women's Day 2026 because Women's Day demands more than sloganeering — more than the digital tributes and the curated photographs of "inspiring women" that flood the internet for twenty-four hours before the world returns to its ordinary habits. It demands honesty about what female authority actually looked like, in a specific place, in a specific era, on ordinary school days and on the streets of a city that was simultaneously frightened and resilient, traumatized and stubbornly alive.

Amritsar, in the late 1980s and through the 1990s, was not a metaphor. It was a lived climate. The militancy, the counterinsurgency, the checkpoints, the convoys, the political assassinations, the curfews, the whispered names — these were the furniture of ordinary childhood in that city, so familiar they had ceased to be remarkable and yet so saturating they had altered the atmospheric pressure of every conversation, every school assembly, every family dinner where adults chose their words with the care of people who understood that words had weight. Children absorbed all of this. We became, without knowing it, extraordinarily precise readers of adult composure. We learned to distinguish between adults who were managing fear and adults who had arrived at something beyond it — something harder and more useful, which I would only learn to call integrity much later.

Three women in that Amritsar gave me my first understanding of what female integrity looked like in public.

Their names are Manveen Sandhu. Poonam Khera Sidhu. Bibi Inderjit Kaur.

I carry them into every room I enter. I have carried them across an ocean and into more than fifteen years of American medical training and institutional life. They are among the reasons I know what I am looking for when I look at a person and ask myself whether they have form — whether they have built, through accumulated choice, a self that the conditions around them cannot dissolve.

Let me begin at the beginning. Let me begin at the school.

I. Manveen Sandhu — The Woman Who Inherited a Vision and Made It Her Own

I began at Spring Dale at the Green Avenue campus. That is how most of us began — in the junior school, in the earliest years, before the move to the main Fatehgarh Churian Road campus that would become the institution of my adolescence and eventually the institution of my departure. By the time I was moving through the senior school, Manveen Sandhu was its principal. She was not simply an administrator. She was the atmosphere.

To understand what she was the atmosphere of, you have to understand where Spring Dale came from.

Its founder, Surinder Singh Sandhu, began the school not with a building but with a conviction: he started Spring Dale in his garage with the help of his wife, Mrs. Davinder Pal Kaur Sandhu — herself an innovative educator — with only four students. It proved his belief that one doesn't need fancy infrastructure to provide quality education; all one needs is a clear educational vision. He had served in Ethiopia, in the Ministry of Education. He came back to Amritsar with a sense of what schools elsewhere could be and a determination to build one that was not constrained by what Amritsar assumed schools had to be. When the proper campus was ready, he invited Bhagat Puran Singh — the founder of Pingalwara — to lay its foundation stone on April 1, 1981.

That choice of founding figure was not accidental. Surinder Singh Sandhu understood that the act of establishing a school in Punjab, in 1981, at the beginning of a decade that would bring extraordinary violence, required a moral anchor that was beyond political dispute. Bhagat Puran Singh was that anchor — a man who had spent his life picking up the broken bodies of Punjab's discarded people and refusing to put them down again. To begin a school under his blessing was to declare the school's allegiance to the most fundamental form of Punjabi civilizational seriousness: the seriousness of those who show up, without institutional support, for those who have been left behind.

The motto drawn from Tagore — Where the Mind Is Without Fear — completed the declaration. The founder was telling his city, through the language of the poet and the presence of the saint, exactly what he was trying to build: a space of intellectual fearlessness inside a Punjab that was rapidly learning to be afraid.

Manveen Sandhu married Surinder Singh Sandhu's son, Dr. Shivinder Singh Sandhu — an orthopaedic surgeon — and entered that institutional inheritance as a daughter-in-law. But to describe her role through the grammar of familial inheritance alone would be to miss what she actually did. She did not simply tend the flame. She changed its character. She made the school into something that exceeded what even its visionary founder had initially imagined, because she brought to its principalship a creativity and a cultural ambition that transformed it from an excellent school into an institution with a civilizational argument.

She was noted for her exemplary integration of Multiple Intelligences into the curriculum. In a Punjab where children were being raised in an environment of fear and external pressure — where the temptation of every institution was to reduce, to simplify, to produce obedience rather than imagination — she insisted that the school's job was to find every kind of intelligence in every child and honour it. This was pedagogical philosophy. It was also political philosophy. It was a refusal to accept the reductive terms that the times were offering.

She did not stop at the school walls. She directed Punarjyot, an organization dedicated to the exploration, conservation, and advancement of the Punjabi mother tongue, reflecting her commitment to cultural heritage amid declining usage. She founded the Saanjh: Amritsar-Lahore Festival, designed to enhance cultural interaction between the two cities by highlighting shared Punjabi linguistic and artistic traditions, including theatre productions that bridged communities on both sides of the border. She brought Pakistani artists to the city of the Golden Temple at a moment when the political atmosphere made such collaboration not merely difficult but in some eyes suspect. She insisted, through the mechanism of culture and theatre and shared language, that Punjab's proper inheritance was not only rupture — not only the Partition, not only the militancy, not only the violence that the decade's male protagonists were administering with such spectacular efficiency.

She authored a book on Maharaja Ranjit Singh, whose research was instrumental in bringing fair historical representation to Moran Sarkar — the dancing girl whom the Maharaja married in 1802 and whom official history had either ignored or reduced to a footnote. She found Moran Sarkar in the margin of the historical record and pulled her into the center with scholarly seriousness and evident care. This was not incidental. A woman who went looking in the footnotes of history for the women whom power had obscured was telling her students, and her city, something important about whose stories deserved to be told.

When I think of Manveen Sandhu in those school years, what I think of is not any single event or any single pronouncement. It is the texture of the institution she inhabited. A school run by a certain kind of principal has a different quality from a school run by an administrator. The difference is not always visible in the timetable or the examination results. It is visible in the atmosphere — in whether children feel that their inner lives matter as much as their test scores, in whether the arts are treated as serious or decorative, in whether the curriculum believes that education is the transmission of information or the formation of persons.

Spring Dale, in those years, felt like a school that believed in the formation of persons.

I did not know, in those years, everything she was doing outside the school gates. I did not know about Punarjyot or Saanjh or the book on Maharaja Ranjit Singh. I knew what children know: the atmosphere. The feeling that this institution, and the woman at its head, believed that we were worth something more than a good CBSE result. That Punjab, for all its violence and its fear, was also something more than its headlines.

Her efforts were recognized by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, which conferred the National Award for Teachers 2008 upon her. She did not live to collect it. On January 11, 2009, she and her husband, Dr. Shivinder Singh Sandhu, died in a road accident near Bikaner, Rajasthan, while on the way home to Amritsar. She was forty-six years old.

I had already left for the United States by then. I heard of her death across the distance of an ocean and more than two years of life lived in another country, in another climate, in the entirely different institutional grammar of American medicine. The news arrived with the particular force that deaths acquire when they happen to people you have not yet said thank you to. When you were the child watching them from a row of school chairs, and you left before you had the vocabulary for the gratitude, and then the opportunity to offer it closes permanently with a tyre burst on a Rajasthan highway.

Kirat Sandhu and Sahiljit Sandhu received the National Award on her behalf from the Vice-President of India on Teacher's Day, September 5, 2009. Her daughter Dr. Kirat Sandhu Cheema donned the mantle of director of the Spring Dale Educational Society immediately following her parents' tragic demise, taking on at a young age the full weight of an institution and an inheritance and a grief that were simultaneously personal and institutional and civic. The school holds an Akhand Path on January 11th every year. A Maa Boli Mela is held in their memory — featuring competitions in Punjabi speech, quizzes, calligraphy, and poetry recitation, keeping alive the language she had fought to protect.

She had said, through everything she built, that Punjab's children deserved a school that refused to be as afraid as the province around it. The school still refuses.

That is her legacy. Not the award. Not the book. The refusal.

II. Poonam Khera Sidhu — The Woman Who Went Where Others Would Not

There is a school function I have carried in memory for more than thirty years. The stage near the gym, before the auditorium was built. The open Punjab sky. The rows of children arranged with the particular seriousness of small ceremonies. And a woman at the front of it all who seemed to have arrived from a larger world and yet to belong, unmistakably, to ours.

I do not remember what she said. Children do not carry the content of chief guest speeches. They carry the impression of the person giving them. And the impression Poonam Khera Sidhu made on the children watching her that day — most acutely on my elder sister and her friends, who were at the age when young women read adult women as forecast rather than as decoration — was the impression of someone who had made her way through the world without allowing the world to make her smaller.

My sister could not stop talking about her on the way home.

Not about the speech. About her. The way she held herself. The way she occupied the public space in front of a school without apology or performance. The way she seemed — and this is the word my sister reached for, even then — complete.

It took years to understand what she was reading. She was reading, with the precision that young women in patriarchal societies develop early, the difference between a woman who is tolerated by the institutions she inhabits and a woman who belongs in them. She was reading the evidence of someone who had not been made secondary by the systems through which she had moved. She had found, in Poonam Khera, a woman who could not be described as an exception to the male rule of things — who seemed to be, instead, a straightforward argument for the normalcy of female authority.

What she did not know, and what I did not know, was the full context of that presence.

Poonam Khera Sidhu had been posted to Amritsar alongside her husband because her department was "happy" to post her there — not many officers were opting for the station on account of the disturbed conditions, at least during the first three or four years. The woman who stood on that school stage with such composed authority had chosen the difficult posting. She had arrived in the city that others were leaving, or refusing to come to, and she had gone to work every morning in an income tax office in a Punjab where transport operators had alleged links with extremists and where even process-servers were threatened when they tried to deliver official notices.

The mobile security arrangement for the Deputy Commissioner's household included a bullet-proof car and an LMG-mounted escort vehicle. Poonam agreed to have one constable only with much reluctance.

One constable. In Amritsar. In those years.

And then, one ordinary morning: she drove to the bus stand with a single security guard and her driver, and sat in the bus of the defaulter company — whose owners had allegedly threatened anyone who came near them — after affixing the attachment order, and guided her driver to bring the bus to the Income Tax Office. This created quite a few ripples not only from a security perspective but also sent shivers down the spine of other willful tax defaulters.

The composure I sensed on that school stage was not temperamental performance. It was earned. She had been conducting herself, in exactly the frightened Punjab through which I was also moving as a child, with the same quality she projected in public: the settled, undemonstrative conviction that her job was to be done properly, in full, regardless of the conditions.

This is what my sister was reading. She did not have the evidence. She had the impression, which was the distilled result of a life already being lived in a certain way. Children read people before they can read biographies. My sister read Poonam Khera correctly.

The career that followed confirmed everything. She cracked a major TDS fraud case as Joint Commissioner, appeared as the star prosecution witness over many years, and had her assessment orders — rejecting tax-exempt claims by fraudulent plantation companies — upheld all the way to the highest level. She took study leave and produced what was effectively a PhD thesis on international taxation and transfer-pricing, still a must-read for IRS officers in that domain. She earned an LLM at the University of Michigan. She went to Bangalore and built a software model linking property registration data to tax assessment numbers — detecting evasion running into hundreds of crores — that was later adopted nationally. She investigated multinationals, plugged offshore loopholes, and raised tax recoveries in the thousands of crores.

She retired in March 2023 as Principal Director General of Income Tax (Administration), New Delhi — after nearly thirty-six years of unblemished service.

And then she wrote a book. "Chuckles and Cherished Moments: Essays from the Heart" — a collection of essays previously published in The Tribune, The Hindustan Times, The Economic Times, and The Indian Express, described as reflecting a unique voice combining compassion, wisdom, and wit.

The income tax officer who sat in the defaulter's bus in Amritsar in the early nineties is also the woman who writes essays from the heart. The institutional and the personal are not compartments. They are continuous. They are the same person.

That continuity was what my sister glimpsed from a row of school chairs in a Punjab that was trying very hard to organize everything by fear. She glimpsed a woman who had decided not to be organized by it. She talked about it on the way home. She has never, I suspect, stopped being the young woman who watched that afternoon.

I am writing this now, on Women's Day 2026, more than thirty years after that school function, because the image has not faded. It has not softened. It sits in memory the way certain things do when they are lodged not by repetition but by singularity — by the sharp, unrepeatable precision of a moment in which a child's nervous system registers something important and does not let it go.

She left Amritsar when KBS Sidhu's posting ended. I left Amritsar in May 2007. We each carried the city with us in different containers, toward different destinations. But what she had deposited in the memory of that school function stayed in Amritsar's children long after both of us were gone.

III. Bibi Inderjit Kaur — The Woman Who Kept the Covenant

There is a road in Amritsar that every child in the city knows by moral geography rather than by map. You don't navigate to Pingalwara by street name. You navigate by the weight of the place in the civic imagination of Punjab — by the accumulated decades of Bhagat Puran Singh walking those streets, collecting the bodies that everyone else had decided were not worth collecting, feeding mouths that the city had agreed to stop seeing.

Every child in Amritsar grew up knowing about Pingalwara. Not the way you know a fact. The way you know a moral reference point — a fixed star that tells you where north is. When adults wanted to describe the highest form of selfless service, Pingalwara was the word they reached for. When parents wanted to teach children what the Sikh concept of seva actually looked like in practice, as opposed to the ceremonial version performed in gurdwaras, they pointed toward the gate on the Grand Trunk Road where the abandoned, the disabled, the mentally ill, and the terminally sick were brought in and never turned away.

Bhagat Puran Singh, its founder, was the most famous moral figure in the city's life. He was the man who had begun, decades before I was born, by carrying a single abandoned spastic child on his back for fourteen years — literally carrying a child who had no one else — and from that act of refusal to put the child down had built an institution that eventually housed more than a thousand people society had decided it could not afford to care for. He was a living rebuke to every comfortable form of religious sentimentality. He was Gurbani made ambulatory, made administrative, made institutional.

He was also the man who laid the foundation stone of Spring Dale School on April 1, 1981.

I understood that connection only in retrospect. Surinder Singh Sandhu, in choosing Bhagat Puran Singh to inaugurate his school, was making a statement about what kind of institution he was building — what kind of moral universe it was meant to inhabit. The school and the care home were not separate projects. They were expressions of the same underlying conviction: that Punjab's children, all of them, including the ones everyone else had stopped seeing, deserved to be treated as full human beings.

Bhagat Puran Singh died in 1992. By then I was a child moving through the Spring Dale system, old enough to absorb the news of his death as a civic loss of the most serious kind. What I understood even then was that the question his death raised — who would keep the covenant? — was not merely institutional. It was moral. Pingalwara's whole existence rested on a human decision, renewed daily, to see the people whom society had chosen not to see. Without someone capable of renewing that decision, with the same quality of commitment and the same refusal to be diminished by the scale of the need, the institution would survive in form while dying in spirit.

Dr. Inderjit Kaur had been nominated as Bhagat Puran Singh's successor in 1986, six years before his death. She had come into contact with him in the late 1960s, had been drawn into his orbit by the force of his example, and had eventually been taken as a daughter by the man who had given his entire life to others.

Born on January 25, 1942, she obtained her MBBS degree from Government Medical College, Patiala in 1967. After five years of service with the Directorate of Health Services, Punjab, she moved into private practice. She was already a physician when she encountered Bhagat Puran Singh's work — and what she encountered changed the direction of everything.

This is worth dwelling on. She was not a young woman without options when she chose to attach herself to Pingalwara. She was a trained physician. She had a career, a practice, a professional identity that existed independently of any institution and any founder. She chose Pingalwara not out of necessity but out of recognition — the recognition that what Bhagat Puran Singh had built was the most serious form of public service she had encountered, and that the most serious form of public service was where she needed to be.

In 1992, after Bhagat Puran Singh's death, she became president of Pingalwara, taking over the reins from its founder. Under her leadership, Pingalwara has expanded its reach and services, becoming a lifeline for thousands of individuals across Punjab.

The expansion she oversaw was not expansion for its own sake. It was expansion as moral response to the specific emergencies that Punjab's suffering was producing in her era. Under her stewardship, Pingalwara broadened its mission to confront emerging issues like AIDS and drug addiction while providing free education to marginalized communities. New centers were established. Specialized schools for special education and the hearing impaired were created. Prosthetic and physiotherapy facilities were built.

AIDS and drug addiction — two epidemics that were already reshaping Punjab in the years of my childhood and adolescence, two stigmatized conditions that society was dealing with through the same ancient mechanism it had always applied to the unbearable: by pretending the sufferers did not exist. Bibi Inderjit Kaur looked at those sufferers and did what Bhagat Puran Singh had taught her: she picked them up and did not put them down again.

On January 25, 2008 — her birthday — she was awarded the Padma Bhushan, India's third-highest civilian award, in recognition of her social service. She noted that the news arrived on her birthday. She said the award was the result of the trust's team work.

The trust's team work. Not her achievement. The team's achievement.

That deflection, offered at the moment of receiving one of the country's highest civic honors, is the most compressed possible expression of the moral posture she had inherited from Bhagat Puran Singh and made her own. It is the posture of someone for whom the work is always larger than the worker. Who knows that the institution is the point, not the biography. Who understands that what Pingalwara represents — the decision, renewed every day, to refuse to let the weakest people in the province remain invisible — requires not a hero at the center but a community of the committed around an idea.

I was in the United States when she received the Padma Bhushan. I was in the first year of training at UAMS Little Rock, Arkansas — a long way, geographically, from the gate on the Grand Trunk Road. But I had spent the most formative years of my medical formation in a city where Pingalwara existed, where Bibi Inderjit Kaur's white-clad presence was part of the civic landscape, where the moral argument of the institution was present in the air as a kind of standing question to everyone with training and resources: what are you doing with what you have been given?

That question has followed me into every hospital ward I have entered since.

She is eighty-four years old. She is still at Pingalwara. The covenant is still being kept.

The Thread Between Them

Three women. Three distinct forms of public life. Three different instruments by which female authority was made real and legible in the Punjab of my formation.

Manveen Sandhu chose the instrument of culture and pedagogy. She took an institution her father-in-law had started in a garage with four students and transformed it, through principalship and cultural initiative and scholarly work and cross-border festival and language activism, into something that argued, through its very existence, that Punjab's children deserved more than fear could offer them. She died at forty-six with her work unfinished and her award uncollected, and the school has carried her conviction forward in every January prayer and every Maa Boli Mela since.

Poonam Khera Sidhu chose the instrument of the state — choosing it deliberately, moving through it with integrity across thirty-six years, from an income tax posting in the most dangerous city in Punjab to the apex of one of India's great administrative services, without once surrendering the quality that my sister read in her on a school stage more than three decades ago: the quality of a woman who belongs where she stands.

Bibi Inderjit Kaur chose the instrument of unconditional care — the oldest and most demanding instrument, the one that requires the practitioner to show up every day for people whom society has agreed to abandon, and to do so not as an act of charity but as an act of Khalsa justice, the recognition that the weakest life is as sacred as the strongest and demands the same seriousness.

What joins them is not their methods. What joins them is the refusal. Each of them, in her own register, refused the reduced terms that the frightened Punjab of those years was offering. Manveen Sandhu refused to let the school become merely an examination machine. Poonam Khera Sidhu refused to let the difficult posting become an excuse for diminished performance. Bibi Inderjit Kaur refused to let the AIDS patient, the drug addict, the abandoned child, the mentally ill woman on the road become someone else's problem.

These refusals were not performed publicly. They were constitutive — the substance, not the style, of how each woman lived her public life. They were the decisions that produced the persons my childhood nervous system registered with such precision, and held.

I began at Spring Dale on Green Avenue, in kindergarten, young enough that the world was still entirely constructed by the adults around me. I ended at Spring Dale on Fatehgarh Churian Road, in the tenth grade, old enough to be preparing for a departure I could already feel approaching. Between those two points — between the small child sitting in a Green Avenue classroom and the young man walking out of Fatehgarh Churian Road toward an American future — something happened that I am only now, in my forties, able to fully describe.

Punjab gave me, along with its fear and its beauty and its complicated inheritance, three examples of what it looked like to inhabit public life with form. To show up, without apology, at the full scale of one's responsibility. To refuse, steadily and without drama, to be made smaller by the conditions.

I took those examples to Little Rock, Arkansas in May 2007. I have carried them through everything since.

On Women's Day 2026, I return them to Amritsar. Not because the city does not know them — it knows them better than I ever will — but because some debts require public acknowledgment, and this is mine.

Manveen Sandhu made the school a moral environment.

Poonam Khera Sidhu showed my sister what female authority looked like in the world that waited beyond the school gate.

Bibi Inderjit Kaur showed all of us, every day, on the road we all passed going to school, what it looked like to choose the hardest thing and not put it down.

Three women. One city. One frightened, luminous, impossible, beloved Punjab.

This is what Women's Day means when it is not a hashtag.

It means them.

Manveen Sandhu (13 April 1962 – 11 January 2009) was posthumously awarded the National Award for Teachers 2008 by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, and the Kalpana Chawla Award by the Government of Punjab. Spring Dale Senior School, founded by Surinder Singh Sandhu in 1981 on the Fatehgarh Churian Road, Amritsar, continues under the leadership of the Sandhu family. Poonam Khera Sidhu IRS (Batch 1987) retired in March 2023 as Principal Director General of Income Tax (Administration), New Delhi, after thirty-six years of service. Her book, "Chuckles and Cherished Moments: Essays from the Heart," was published after her retirement. Dr. Bibi Inderjit Kaur, born 25 January 1942, has served as Patron-President of the All India Pingalwara Charitable Society since 1992. She was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2008.