ਪਿੰਜਰਪਿੰਜਰ

About the book

Pinjar, a Punjabi word that means a skeleton, is a novel by Amrita Pritam first published in 1950. It is set in Punjab in the years before and during the Partition of India in 1947, and it follows one young woman whose private life is taken over first by an old family feud and then by a public catastrophe. It has come to be widely considered one of the outstanding works of Indian fiction about Partition, and few Punjabi novels have travelled as far: Pinjar has been translated into other languages, including English and French, made into a Hindi film in India and adapted for television in Pakistan.

Pritam wrote the novel only three years after Partition. She had lived in Lahore until 1947, when she left for India as a refugee at the age of 28, and the violence of that year runs through much of her best known work, including her famous poem Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu. In Pinjar she chose to tell the story of Partition through the women it displaced, at a time when very few writers were doing so. A review in The Tribune in 2005 described it as a novel ahead of its times, and later readers have kept returning to it for the same reason: it asks what a border does to a person, not just to a map.

What is Pinjar about?

Puro is a young Hindu woman whose marriage to Ramchand has been arranged, when Rashid, a young Muslim man, abducts her to settle an old score between their two families. She manages to escape and get home, but her parents refuse to take her back, fearing the dishonour that a returned daughter would bring on the family and on her younger sisters. With nowhere else to go, she returns to Rashid, marries him and begins a new life under a new name, Hamida.

Then Partition arrives, and the violence that had been private becomes general. Families Puro once knew are scattered, and when another young woman connected to her old life is abducted in the riots, Puro is in a position to help her, and does. Near the end she is offered the chance to go back to the family and the life she lost. What she decides, and why, is the question the whole novel has been building towards, and it is best discovered in the book itself.

Themes: a name, a family and a choice

The title carries the first theme. A pinjar is what is left when everything that gave a person a place in the world, her name, her family, her faith and her future, has been taken away. Puro lives under two names in the novel, the one she was born with and the one her marriage gives her, and the distance between those two names is the distance the novel measures. Pritam is not only describing one woman: through Puro she gives a shape to what thousands of abducted and displaced women went through in 1947, most of whose stories were never written down.

The second theme is honour, and who pays for it. Puro's parents are not drawn as cruel people. They refuse her because of what their community would do to the whole family, and that is Pritam's point: a code that claims to protect women can abandon a woman at the very moment she needs protection most. Rashid, too, is refused the easy role of villain. He does a terrible thing, and the novel never excuses it, but he is also shown living with remorse and, over time, with a real care for the woman he wronged. The families and the feud come out of the book worse than either of the two people caught inside it.

The third theme is what a person does with a life she did not choose. Puro begins as someone decisions are made about: her marriage is arranged, her abduction is arranged, her rejection is arranged. Her later actions, above all her decision to risk herself for another abducted woman, are hers. Readers who finish the book arguing about her final choice are responding to exactly what Pritam built: a heroine whose dignity lies not in escaping her fate but in acting with humanity inside it.

ਲੇਖਕ

Amrita Pritam (1919 to 2005) was born in Gujranwala, in the Punjab of undivided India, and published her first collection of poems in 1936, when she was sixteen. She went on to write more than a hundred books of poetry, fiction, essays and autobiography in Punjabi and Hindi, and she remains one of the most widely read Punjabi writers of the twentieth century. She was the first woman to receive the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1956, for her long poem Sunehade, and she later received the Bharatiya Jnanpith in 1982, for Kagaz te Canvas, and the Padma Vibhushan in 2004.

Pinjar is generally counted her most noted work of fiction, and it belongs to the same body of writing as Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu, the poem in which she called on the eighteenth century poet Waris Shah to witness what was happening to Punjab's daughters in 1947. Where the poem laments, the novel follows one daughter all the way through: what was done to her, what it cost her, and what she made of the life that remained.

Translations and adaptations

Khushwant Singh translated Pinjar into English as The Skeleton, the title under which most English readers first met it, and a French translation by Denis Matringe carried it further. A Hindi translation has also kept the novel in circulation well beyond Punjabi readers.

In 2003 the novel reached the screen as the Hindi film Pinjar, written and directed by Chandraprakash Dwivedi and starring Urmila Matondkar as Puro, Manoj Bajpayee as Rashid and Sanjay Suri as Ramchand. The film won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film on National Integration, and Bajpayee received a Special Jury Award for his performance. In Pakistan, the story was adapted again as the television series Ghughi, which premiered on TVOne on 25 January 2018. That a Punjabi novel about 1947 has been filmed in India and serialised in Pakistan says something about how completely it belongs to both sides of the border it describes.

Why does Pinjar still matter?

Pinjar still matters because it recorded, very early, a part of Partition that official history was slow to face: the abduction of women, their rejection by their own families, and the silence that followed. It did so from a woman's point of view, in Punjabi, within three years of the events, by a writer who had herself crossed the new border as a refugee. When Google marked Pritam's birth centenary with a Doodle in 2019, Pinjar was named among the works she is best remembered for, and it is the book through which most new readers, in Punjab and far beyond it, still come to her. For anyone who wants to understand what Partition meant inside a household rather than inside a history book, it remains one of the essential places to start.