Aksharon Ke Saayeਅੱਖਰਾਂ ਦੇ ਸਾਏ

About the book

Aksharon Ke Saaye, published in English as Shadows of Words, is Amrita Pritam's memoir of the inner life. It appeared in Punjabi in 1977, a year after Rasidi Ticket, her famous autobiography, and it is the second of the three autobiographical books she wrote. Where Rasidi Ticket told the outward story of her life, the childhood in Gujranwala, the marriage at sixteen, Partition, Sahir Ludhianvi and Imroz, this book turns inward. It is a quieter, stranger work: short chapters on love, dreams, spirituality and the life of the mind, written by a woman who had already said the shocking things and now wanted to say the true ones.

What is Shadows of Words about?

The book does not follow the straight line of a life. As one study of her autobiographies puts it, it defies the logical pattern of autobiography. It is built from short chapters, and every chapter begins with the word shadow. Through those shadows Pritam looks at the people and forces that shaped her: the mother who died when she was eleven, the father who wanted devotional verse from her, the husband she left, the poet Sahir Ludhianvi whom she loved without return, the artist Imroz with whom she shared forty years, and the friend Sajjad Haider who stood by her before Partition. She also looks at what she calls her inner world: her dreams, her turn towards spirituality in later life, and the writing itself, the pen she once called as much a part of her as the limbs of her body. Readers looking for dates and events will find Rasidi Ticket a better guide. Readers who want to know how Amrita Pritam thought and felt will find this book the more revealing of the two.

The three autobiographies

Pritam wrote three books about her own life, and they make a set. Kala Gulab, Black Rose, came first in 1968. Rasidi Ticket, The Revenue Stamp, followed in 1976 and became the famous one, the book in which she answered Khushwant Singh's joke that her whole life could fit on the back of a revenue stamp. Aksharon Ke Saaye came a year later, in 1977. Together they cover a writing life of more than six decades, from her first collection of poems, Amrit Lehran, published when she was sixteen, to the honours of her last years: the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1956 for the long poem Sunehade, the Jnanpith Award in 1982 for Kagaz Te Canvas, the Padma Shri in 1969 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2004. The English edition, Shadows of Words, was published by Macmillan India. It is the version most readers outside Punjab meet, and it keeps the book's structure, the short shadow chapters, intact.

The author

Amrita Pritam (1919 to 2005) was born Amrit Kaur in Gujranwala, in what is now Pakistan, the only child of a schoolteacher mother and a poet father who edited a literary journal. Her mother died when she was eleven, and the loss turned her from faith to atheism, a position she kept all her life. She married Pritam Singh at sixteen and moved to Lahore, where she worked at the radio station and began to publish. Partition in 1947 drove her from Lahore to Delhi, and on a train journey in that year she wrote the poem that made her immortal, Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu, calling on the 18th century poet of Heer Ranjha to look at a Punjab drowned in blood. She edited the Punjabi literary monthly Nagmani for 33 years, much of it with Imroz, and wrote more than a hundred books of poetry, fiction, essays and memoir. She was nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 1986 and died in Delhi on 31 October 2005, at the age of 86.

Reception and legacy

Shadows of Words has never had the fame of Rasidi Ticket, and that is part of its interest. It is the book Pritam wrote when she no longer needed to explain herself, and it is read today by those who want the writer behind the legend: the woman who wrote about Sahir without apology, who lived openly with Imroz for forty years, who smoked and said so, and who in later life wrote about Osho, dreams and the call of the unknown. In 2019, on the hundredth anniversary of her birth, Google marked her with a doodle, calling her one of history's foremost female Punjabi writers, who dared to live the life she imagines. Her books remain in print in Punjabi, Hindi and English, and her three autobiographies are still the first place readers go to meet her. Rasidi Ticket tells you what happened. Aksharon Ke Saaye tells you what it felt like from the inside.