Dharti Sagar Te Sippiyanਧਰਤੀ ਸਾਗਰ ਤੇ ਸਿੱਪੀਆਂ

About the book

Dharti Sagar Te Sippiyan, in English Earth, Ocean and Shells, is a Punjabi novel by Amrita Pritam, the first woman to win the Sahitya Akademi Award for a work in Punjabi. It holds a distinct place on her shelf of more than 100 books: it was the first of her books to be filmed, adapted for the screen as Kadambari under the director Basu Bhattacharya.

The title gathers three elemental images, the earth underfoot, the ocean beyond it and the shells the sea leaves behind, in the manner of a writer whose poetry and fiction return again and again to land, water and what survives of love. Detailed plot summaries of this novel in English are scarce, and this page does not invent one: what the record establishes firmly is the book's author, its pioneering place in her film history, and the themes her fiction of this period is known for.

What is Dharti Sagar Te Sippiyan about?

It is a novel from the pen of the writer whose documented subjects, across poetry and prose, are Partition, women and dreams. After her divorce in 1960, Amrita Pritam's work became more clearly feminist, and many of her stories and poems drew on the unhappy experience of her marriage. Readers who know her fiction meet women who refuse to be only what custom allows, and love treated as a force that tests every boundary a society sets around it. That is the ground on which Dharti Sagar Te Sippiyan stands in her bibliography, between the Partition wound of Pinjar and the autobiographical candour of Rasidi Ticket.

The first of her books on film

Dharti Sagar Te Sippiyan was the first of Amrita Pritam's books to be filmed, as Kadambari, directed by Basu Bhattacharya. Sources differ on the film's year: the current Wikipedia entry gives 1975, while older reference copies give 1965, so this page gives no year rather than a doubtful one. It opened a line of adaptations that continued with Unah Di Kahani, filmed as Daaku in 1976, and reached its widest audience when Pinjar became an award winning Hindi film in 2003.

Themes: women, love and the inner life

Across her career Amrita Pritam moved from the romantic poetry of her teens through the Progressive Writers' Movement, whose left leaning writers attacked empire and hunger, into a body of work centred on women and their inner lives. Her poem Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu, written as she fled Lahore in 1947, made the suffering of Punjab's women the voice of Partition itself. Her fiction carries the same charge: women's desire, dignity and refusal are not decorations on the story but the story. Dharti Sagar Te Sippiyan belongs to that mature voice, the one India and Pakistan read on both sides of a border her books never recognised.

The author

Amrita Pritam was born Amrit Kaur on 31 August 1919 in Gujranwala, in present day Pakistan. Her mother died when she was eleven; she moved to Lahore with her father and published her first collection, Amrit Lehran, in 1936, at sixteen. She worked in the Punjabi service of All India Radio in Delhi until 1961, and for 33 years she edited the Punjabi literary monthly Nagmani with the artist Imroz, who also designed most of her book covers. She died in Delhi on 31 October 2005.

Honours and legacy

Her honours trace the rise of modern Punjabi literature itself: the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1956 for her long poem Sunehade, making her the first woman to receive it for a Punjabi work; the Bharatiya Jnanpith in 1982 for Kagaz Te Canvas; the Padma Shri in 1969; and in 2004 both the Padma Vibhushan and the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship, India's highest literary honour. She was also the first recipient of the Punjab Rattan Award. Dharti Sagar Te Sippiyan matters in that story as the novel that first carried her name from the page to the cinema screen.