Nagmaniਨਾਗਮਣੀ

About the collection

Nagmani is a collection of Punjabi poems by Amrita Pritam, first published in 1964. It came nine years after Sunehde, the collection that won her the 1956 Sahitya Akademi Award, and it sits in the middle of her long career as a poet, written when she was in her mid-forties and living in Delhi, where she had settled after Partition. Kagaz Te Canvas, the collection that won her the Jnanpith Award, came later.

Two other collections appeared in the same year, Ik Si Anita and Chak Nambar Chatti, a sign of how productive this period of her life was. By 1964 she had already published a dozen collections of poetry, and she would go on writing for another four decades.

What does Nagmani mean?

Nagmani means the serpent's jewel. In Indian folk belief, the nagmani is a mythical gem that grows in the head of a serpent, glowing in the dark and carrying great power. The word joins nag, a serpent, with mani, a jewel.

The name suits the book. Pritam's poems often work the same way: a small, bright thing carried in the dark, love and longing that glow where they are least expected. The serpent is a creature of the earth and of danger; the jewel is precious and hidden. Pritam spent her career writing about what respectable society kept hidden, above all the inner lives of women, and the title holds both halves of that work at once.

The magazine with the same name

Two years after the book, Pritam gave the same name to something bigger. In 1966 she and the artist Imroz started Nagmani, a Punjabi literary monthly, and she edited it for 33 years. The magazine dominated the Punjabi literary scene for three decades, and through it she became the mentor of a third generation of Punjabi poets and short story writers.

Nagmani published new writers from small Punjabi towns and villages, and it made room for every kind of writing. The writers it nurtured included Gurdial Singh, Dalip Kaur Tiwana and Shiv Kumar Batalvi, three of the most important Punjabi writers of the century. The magazine was designed by Imroz, who also designed most of Pritam's book covers, and the two ran their own publishing house under the Nagmani name.

The book and the magazine are easy to confuse, and they are often confused. The collection came first, in 1964; the monthly followed in 1966. Both carry the same serpent's jewel in their name, and both belong to the same project: keeping Punjabi literature alive and in print.

The author

Amrita Pritam was born Amrit Kaur on 31 August 1919 in Gujranwala, in what is now Pakistan. She published her first collection of poems, Amrit Lehran, in 1936, at sixteen, and married Pritam Singh the same year, taking his first name as her surname. Her early poems were romantic; the collection Lok Peed, published in 1944, turned her towards the lives of ordinary people and the politics of her time.

Partition changed her life and her work. She left Lahore for Delhi in 1947, and on the journey she wrote “Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu”, the poem that calls on the eighteenth-century poet Waris Shah to speak from his grave about the suffering of Punjab's women. It remains her most famous poem, recited on both sides of the border.

Her honours came steadily: the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1956 for Sunehde, the first time a woman had received it; the Padma Shri in 1969; the Jnanpith Award for Kagaz Te Canvas; the Padma Vibhushan in 2004. She served as a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha from 1986 to 1992. She died in New Delhi on 31 October 2005, aged 86, having published more than a hundred books.

Why Nagmani still matters

Nagmani is not Pritam's most famous book. Readers usually meet her first through Sunehde, Pinjar or the Waris Shah poem. But the collection matters for what it stands between: the award-winning love poems of the 1950s and the spare, late poems of Kagaz Te Canvas. It is the work of a poet at the height of her powers, sure of her voice and no longer asking permission.

It also matters because of the name. When Pritam called her magazine Nagmani, she gave Punjabi literature a jewel of its own: a place where new writers could publish, and where the language could be argued over in print for thirty-three years. The book gave the magazine its name, and the magazine gave the name its fame. To read the collection is to meet the word before it became an institution.