Lawrence dented a practice among some in the Bedi clan of killing baby girls. The justification for the practice was this. The clan that produced Guru Nanak would lose prestige if its girls married into inferior clans; if they married within the clan, it would be like incest. The only solution was to kill the girl-child. Some of the Jullundur-based Bedi clans petitioned John Lawrence to be allowed, under the principle of non-interference with religious and social customs, to bury their daughters at birth, a ‘custom’ they claimed to have followed for ‘the last four centuries’. Confronting the
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