Leena Dhingra

Leena Dhingra was born in Lahore in 1943 and came to Europe in 1948 after the partition of British India had left her family stranded in France. Her father, an English lecturer at Government College in Lahore, had taken up a six-month posting with UNESCO in Paris. Her mother had placed Dhingra and her sister in a boarding school while she visited her husband, during which time partition occurred. As an adolescent, Dhingra received her education in ten different schools across France, India, England and Switzerland.

In 1957 Dhingra moved to the United Kingdom to finish her schooling and prepare to go to drama school. In 1975 she joined a grouping that protested Indira Gandhi’s declaration of a state of internal emergency, which included the Indian Workers’ Association.

She began her research into Madan Lal Dhingra in the 1970s. In the late 1970s she enrolled in teacher training and then taught in a local community education centre. In the 1980s she was a member of the Asian Women Writers’ Collective. She published her first work, ‘Breaking Out of the Labels’, in the anthology Watchers and Seekers, followed by her first novel, Amritvela, in 1988. She holds an MA in creative writing and a PhD from the University of East Anglia.

Dhingra has worked as an actor in theatre and radio plays as well as on the small screen and in films. She appeared in the long-running BBC dramas Doctors and EastEnders, as well as ITV’s Coronation Street. Her work on television also includes the adaptation of Meera Syal’s novel Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee, Doctor Who, The Bill, Casualty, Silent Witness and Ackley Bridge. Her work in film includes Ayub Khan Din's East Is East (1999) and Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham (2002).

In 2021, Leena Dhingra published Exhumation: The Life and Death of Madan Lal Dhingra, a memoir that explores her own journey from India to Britain as well as her relationship with her great uncle, Madan Lal Dhingra, the culmination of her long-standing research into his life story.