How to remove horizontal bar in Hindi word

For character recognition, I wish to remove the horizontal bar (Shirorekha) from the word to get characters in the following image. I tried to use Hough Transforms for line and then looked for longest line. Blue line is the longest, but this too is a vertical line. I do not get results better than this. Since the line is crooked and not straight I do not get good results. Any ideas will be helpful. Please help.

[Ashish Uthama]

Posting the original image might help someone try out alternatives. Did you try tweaking the hough/houghlines settings? (especially the angle theta?)