Pinjarਪਿੰਜਰ

The story

Puro is a young woman from a Hindu family, engaged to Ramchand, when she is abducted by Rashid, a Muslim man acting on an old feud between their families. When she escapes and returns home, her parents turn her away, afraid of what taking her back would bring.

Married to Rashid and renamed Hamida, Puro builds a life she did not choose. When Partition arrives and the violence spreads, she is drawn into the fate of other abducted women, and has to decide where she belongs. The ending is best left for the reader.

Themes

The novel is about what happens to women’s bodies and names when communities go to war. Puro feels herself reduced to a pinjar, a skeleton, stripped of the identity others once gave her.

It is also a book about choice. Amrita Pritam refuses easy villains: Rashid is both the man who wronged Puro and a man capable of remorse and kindness.

Writing and publication

Pinjar was published in Punjabi in 1950, three years after Amrita Pritam left Lahore as a refugee. It drew on what she had seen and heard of abducted women on both sides of the border.

Translation and film

Khushwant Singh translated the novel into English as The Skeleton. In 2003 it was adapted as the Hindi film Pinjar, directed by Chandraprakash Dwivedi, which won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film on National Integration.

Place in Partition literature

Pinjar is read alongside Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan and the stories of Saadat Hasan Manto as one of the essential works of Partition fiction, and one of the few written from a woman’s point of view at the time.