Amrita Pritamਅੰਮ੍ਰਿਤਾ ਪ੍ਰੀਤਮ

Early life

Amrita Pritam was born Amrit Kaur on 31 August 1919 in Gujranwala, a town in undivided Punjab that now lies in Pakistan. Her father, Kartar Singh Hitkari, was a poet and a scholar of Braj Bhasha who edited a literary journal, so books and verse were part of the very air she breathed as a child. Her mother died when Amrita was eleven, and she moved with her father to Lahore, a city whose literary salons and publishing houses would shape her youth.

She began writing as a schoolgirl, and her first collection of poems, Amrit Lehran (Immortal Waves), appeared in 1936, when she was sixteen. The year before, in 1935, she had married Pritam Singh, an editor, and taken his name — the name under which the world would come to know her. Lahore in the 1930s and 1940s was a ferment of progressive writing, and the young poet found her place among its circles, publishing steadily and building a reputation for a voice that was intimate, romantic and unafraid.

Partition and ‘Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu’

The Partition of 1947 tore her world apart. She left Lahore for India as a refugee, part of one of the largest forced migrations in human history, and on that journey she wrote the poem that would define her: ‘Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu’ — ‘Today I call on Waris Shah.’ Addressed to the eighteenth-century poet of Heer Ranjha, it begged him to rise from his grave and write of the suffering women of Punjab, and to turn his pen to a new, bloodied page of the region’s story.

The poem travelled faster than any book could. It was read aloud at gatherings, sung by folk singers, and printed on both sides of the new border, becoming the best-known Punjabi lament for Partition. It made Amrita Pritam not just a poet but a public voice for grief — a woman who had given words to what millions felt and could not say.

Major works

Her novel Pinjar (The Skeleton, 1950) is the cornerstone of her fiction. It follows Puro, a young Hindu woman abducted during the communal violence around Partition, and traces what abduction, forced marriage and social rejection do to a woman’s identity. Written with a starkness unusual for its time, it remains one of the defining literary works on Partition’s cost to women, and was later adapted into an acclaimed Hindi film.

She went on to write more than a hundred books — poetry, novels, essays, memoir — in Punjabi and Hindi. For many years she worked with the Punjabi service of All India Radio in Delhi, and with her companion, the painter and poet Imroz, she edited Nagmani, a Punjabi literary monthly that became a platform for new writing. Her autobiography, Rasidi Ticket (Revenue Stamp, 1976), is among her most widely read books — candid about her loves, her defiance of convention, and her spiritual searching. She wrote of her long relationship with Imroz, the artist who shared her Delhi home for more than four decades, with an openness that startled and moved readers.

Honours and later life

Recognition came early and kept coming. In 1956 she became the first woman to receive the Sahitya Akademi Award, for the poetry collection Sunehade. The Padma Shri followed in 1969. In 1981 she received the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honour, for Kagaz te Canvas (Paper and Canvas). She served as a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha from 1986 to 1992, and in 2004 she was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, the country’s second-highest civilian honour.

She died in New Delhi on 31 October 2005, at the age of eighty-six, after a long illness. Her funeral drew writers, artists and admirers from across the subcontinent.

Legacy

Amrita Pritam’s work has been translated into many Indian and foreign languages and is taught in Punjabi literature courses in India and Pakistan alike. She broke the mould of what a woman writer in Punjabi could be — romantic without apology, political without sloganeering, spiritual without orthodoxy. For generations of readers, she remains the first and greatest woman’s voice in modern Punjabi letters.