Punjabi literature has had women writing in it for a century and the list is short relative to the number of men, for the ordinary reasons.
Amrita Pritam is the best known. Dalip Kaur Tiwana wrote over thirty novels and held a university chair. Ajeet Cour wrote the frankest Punjabi autobiography anyone has written. Manjit Tiwana and Prabhjot Kaur wrote poetry. Krishna Sobti wrote about Punjab in Hindi.
Before them, the women's literature of Punjab was oral and anonymous: the boliyan, the suhag, the ghorian, the alahuniyan, the trinjan songs and the chakki songs, which together are a much larger body of composition than everything written by named Punjabi men.
It was collected by men, cleaned up, and attributed to nobody.
The single largest gap in Punjabi literature is not a missing author. It is that the biggest body of composition in the language has no names attached to it and was never written down as its makers made it.
That is fixable by anyone with a phone and a grandmother, and it is running out of time.
Peero Preman, who left a life in a Lahore brothel for a dera at Chathianwala in the nineteenth century and left about a hundred and sixty kafis, is the earliest named woman writing in the language. Her verse was kept by the dera she went to and has been in print only since the 1990s.
The Punjabi women's magazines of the early twentieth century published a great deal of writing by women that has never been collected or reprinted.
The diaspora has produced a further generation writing in English and Punjabi, and almost none of it is read in Punjab.