Kala Gulabਕਾਲਾ ਗੁਲਾਬ

About the book

Kala Gulab (Black Rose) is a Punjabi autobiography by Amrita Pritam, published in 1968. It is the first of the three autobiographies in which she told her own life in her own words, before Rasidi Ticket (The Revenue Stamp, 1976), which is also in this Kosh, and Aksharon kay Saayee (Shadows of Words). Reference accounts of her work list the three books together, and Kala Gulab is the one that came first: the earliest full attempt by the leading Punjabi woman writer of her century to set down her life as she herself understood it.

The title is an image, not an ornament. A black rose is a rose that should not exist in nature, a flower marked out by its colour, and Amrita chose it for a life that had never followed the expected pattern. By 1968 she was 49, already the first woman to win the Sahitya Akademi Award for a Punjabi work, for her long poem Sunehade in 1956, already known across India and Pakistan for the Partition poem Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu and the novel Pinjar, and eight years past the divorce after which, as accounts of her work note, her writing became more clearly feminist and drew openly on the unhappy experience of her marriage.

What is Kala Gulab about?

Kala Gulab is about Amrita Pritam's own life up to the late 1960s, told by herself. That life had already contained several lives. She was born Amrit Kaur in Gujranwala in 1919, lost her mother at eleven, and published her first book of poems, Amrit Lehran, at sixteen, the year she married Pritam Singh, the editor to whom she had been engaged in childhood. She wrote through the Progressive Writers period, worked at the Lahore radio station before Partition and then in the Punjabi service of All India Radio in Delhi until 1961, and in 1947 made the refugee journey from Lahore to Delhi out of which her most famous poem was born. An autobiography written in 1968 had all of that to account for: the child poet, the Partition witness, the broadcaster, the divorced woman writer making her own household and her own name.

It also had a present tense. In the years just before Kala Gulab she had begun editing Nagmani, the Punjabi literary monthly she ran with the artist and writer Imroz for 33 years, and Imroz, who designed most of her book covers, was the companion of her later life. The autobiography therefore stands at a hinge in her story: behind it the marriage, the radio years and Partition; ahead of it Rasidi Ticket, the Jnanpith Award and the long Delhi decades. Readers who know only the famous second autobiography meet, in Kala Gulab, the earlier and less guarded act of self telling on which it built.

Themes: a woman tells her own life

The book's importance is bound up with who was doing the telling. Amrita Pritam was the first prominent woman writer in Punjabi, and an autobiography by a woman, in Punjabi, in 1968, was itself a claim: that a woman's inner life was a fit subject for literature and that she, not others, would decide what it meant. Accounts of her writing after her 1960 divorce describe work that became more feminist and drew on her own experience rather than hiding it, and Kala Gulab belongs to that turn. Its themes are the ones her whole work keeps returning to, now attached to her own name instead of a character's: love and its costs, a marriage that failed, Partition and displacement, and the making of a writer out of a girl who began publishing at sixteen.

The author

Amrita Pritam (31 August 1919 to 31 October 2005) was born in Gujranwala, now in Pakistan, and died in New Delhi. Across more than six decades she published over 100 books of poetry, fiction, biography and essays, and edited Nagmani with Imroz. Her honours include the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1956, the Padma Shri in 1969, the year after Kala Gulab appeared, the Bharatiya Jnanpith in 1982 for Kagaz te Canvas, and the Padma Vibhushan and the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship in 2004. She was a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha from 1986 to 1992. Her Pinjar, Doctor Dev, Dharti Sagar te Sippiyan and Rasidi Ticket are also in this Kosh.

Translations and legacy

Kala Gulab travelled. Accounts of her work record that her autobiographical books, Black Rose and Rasidi Ticket among them, were translated into English, French, Danish, Japanese, Mandarin and other languages, carrying this Punjabi life story to readers far beyond Punjabi. In English the book is studied under its translated title, The Black Rose, and it is still cited in scholarship on her writing. Within her own shelf it holds a clear place: Rasidi Ticket is the more famous autobiography, but Kala Gulab is where Amrita Pritam first took her own life as her subject, and every later telling, hers and others', starts from the door this book opened in 1968.