Imrozਇਮਰੋਜ਼

Early life

Imroz was born Inderjeet Singh on 26 January 1926 at Chak number 36 in Lyallpur, in undivided Punjab. He grew up with a draftsman's hand and a poet's eye, training himself in the visual arts at a time when Punjab's cultural life was being remade by Partition. After 1947 he made his way to Delhi, where the city's literary circles were gathering around the great names of Punjabi letters.

It was in Delhi that he met Amrita Pritam, already the most celebrated woman writing in Punjabi. The meeting changed both their lives. Inderjeet Singh became Imroz, a name meaning "today", and the two began a companionship that would last more than four decades, until Amrita's death in 2005.

Artist and editor

Imroz was a visual artist of genuine distinction: a painter, illustrator, and designer whose work gave a visual language to modern Punjabi literature. He designed the covers of Amrita Pritam's books, creating images that became inseparable from her words, and his paintings, bold, spare, and deeply romantic, were exhibited and admired in their own right.

Together with Amrita he ran Nagmani, the monthly Punjabi literary magazine, for thirty-three years. Imroz handled the magazine's design and illustration, shaping its look as carefully as Amrita shaped its words. For a generation of readers, Nagmani was the window into contemporary Punjabi writing, and Imroz's hand was visible on every page.

His paintings drew on folk motifs and modernist line-work in equal measure: spare figures, lovers entwined, faces dissolving into colour. He illustrated Amrita's books so sympathetically that readers came to see his images as the visual companion to her verse. Though he never sought the spotlight, exhibitions of his work drew admirers who recognised in his canvases the same emotional directness that marked his poetry.

Poet

Though known first as a painter, Imroz was also a poet, and after Amrita's death he turned to verse with new urgency, writing poems that carried his grief and his undimmed love. His collections include Jashan Jaari Hai, Manchaaha Hi Rishta, and Rang Tere Mere. His poetry, like his painting, is direct and unadorned, speaking of love as a daily practice rather than a grand abstraction.

When asked once whether he had ever been jealous of Sahir Ludhianvi, the famous poet whom Amrita had loved before him, Imroz answered simply that anyone loved by Amrita was dear to him too, and that Sahir's picture hung in his room. It was a measure of the man: generous, secure, and utterly devoted.

Later life and legacy

After Amrita Pritam died on 31 October 2005, Imroz kept her memory as a living presence. He would correct anyone who spoke of her in the past tense: "Amrita hai, yahin hai", she is here. He spent his final years in Mumbai, cared for by Amrita's daughter-in-law Alka Kwatra, painting and writing to the end.

Imroz died in Mumbai on 22 December 2023 at the age of ninety-seven. The writer Uma Trilok had chronicled the couple's story in Amrita-Imroz: A Love Story, published by Penguin in 2006. With his passing, one of Indian literature's great love stories came to its close, but the paintings, the poems, and the thirty-three years of Nagmani remain.