ਲੋਕ ਪੀੜਲੋਕ ਪੀੜ

About the collection

Lok Peed (People's Anguish), published in 1944, is the poetry collection in which Amrita Pritam stopped writing only about love and began writing about hunger. It is a short book with a long shadow: the moment the most famous woman poet in Punjabi turned her gift towards the suffering of ordinary people, and never turned back. The poems were written during the Second World War, in the aftermath of the Bengal famine of 1943, when millions died while grain moved to feed a war. Amrita, then in her mid-twenties, attacked the war economy and the rulers who ran it, in verse that was direct, angry and public. Readers who knew her only as a romantic poet found a different writer here.

What is Lok Peed about?

The collection's subject is the price ordinary people paid for a war fought in their name. Its poems speak of an economy drained by war, of grain and money flowing away from the villages, and of a famine that the rulers treated as someone else's problem. The anger in the book is aimed upwards, at the British Raj and at the profiteers of wartime, not at fate. That was new in Amrita's work: her early poems had been about love, longing and the inner life; these poems are about bread, prices and power. The title says it plainly. Lok peed means the anguish of the people, and the book gives that anguish a voice that is plain-spoken rather than ornate.

A turning point in Amrita Pritam's writing

Amrita had been publishing since she was sixteen. Her first collection, Amrit Lehran, appeared in 1936, and by 1943 she had six collections of poetry to her name, most of them romantic in temper. Lok Peed came after those six, and it broke the pattern. It was her first social poetry, the first book in which the world outside her own heart became the subject. The change was not a passing mood. Within a few years she wrote Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu (1948), her great lament for Partition, and then Pinjar (1950), the novel of abducted women that became her most famous book. Both grow directly from the turn Lok Peed made: a poet who had learned to look outward, and to speak for people who had no voice of their own.

The Progressive Writers' Movement

The turn had a name and a company. The Progressive Writers' Movement, founded in British India in the 1930s, brought together writers who believed literature should serve social change, and who wrote against imperial rule and for the poor. Its members were largely left-leaning and anti-imperialist, and its influence ran through Punjabi, Urdu and Hindi writing alike. Amrita joined it in the early 1940s, and Lok Peed is the clearest mark of its influence on her work. The movement gave her a language for anger and a readership that expected it; she gave the movement a woman's voice it had not had before.

ਲੇਖਕ

Amrita Pritam (1919-2005) was born Amrita Kaur in Gujranwala, in what is now Pakistan, and became the first prominent woman writer in Punjabi. Her career ran for more than sixty years and produced over a hundred books: poetry, novels, essays and an autobiography, Rasidi Ticket, that is itself a classic. She won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1956 for the long poem Sunehade, the Bharatiya Jnanpith in 1982 for Kagaz te Canvas, and the Padma Vibhushan in 2004. She edited the Punjabi literary journal Nagmani for more than three decades with her companion, the artist Imroz. Lok Peed sits near the start of that long career, written when she was in her mid-twenties, and it already shows the fearlessness that defined her.

Reception and legacy

Lok Peed is not Amrita Pritam's best-known book, and it never won a prize. Its importance is different: it is the hinge of her career, the book after which the romantic poet became a public voice. Literary histories of Punjabi poetry cite it as the moment her work turned social, and as an early example of Punjabi protest poetry written by a woman. For readers coming to Amrita through Pinjar or her Partition poem, it is the book that explains how she got there. It is also a reminder of how young she was when she found her subject: in her mid-twenties, writing about famine and war while the war was still being fought.