It is the personas of Heer and Ranjha that come back to haunt us repeatedly. They symbolise the men and women we did not become and the social order we did not choose. Ranjha is the man who did not give the prevailing economic dispensation dominion over his soul, who rejected the idea that a man needed to own land and wealth or assert power over the woman in his life as a measure of his worth. Heer is the woman who took full responsibility for her life and body, asserting her rights, not just in the narrow sense of romantic or sexual agency, but in interacting with the outside world
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