ਐਤਵਾਰਸੁਨੇਹੇ

About the book

Sunehre (ਸੁਨੇਹੇ, Messages) is a collection of Punjabi poems by Amrita Pritam, published in 1955. It is the book that made her reputation as a poet, and the book that made literary history: in 1956 it won the Sahitya Akademi Award, and Pritam became the first woman ever to receive the award. Critics and readers alike have since called it her magnum opus, the work her name rests on.

The title says what the poems are. Sunehre means messages, and the collection reads as messages sent across the new border drawn through Punjab in 1947: to homes left behind, to people lost in the violence, and to readers on both sides who shared the same grief. Pritam wrote them in the years just after Partition, when the wound was still fresh and the language to describe it was still being found. It is often described as a single long poem as much as a collection, and the two descriptions suit it: the poems belong together, written in one voice across the years after Partition.

The poems: messages from a divided Punjab

Pritam had lived Partition herself. Born Amrit Kaur in Gujranwala in 1919, she moved to Lahore as a girl and was living there when British India was divided in August 1947. She left for Delhi at twenty-eight, a refugee, and on the train journey she wrote the poem that would make her famous, Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu, calling on the eighteenth-century poet Waris Shah to witness what Punjab was doing to itself. Sunehre carries the same anguish into book form: the pain of leaving home, the suffering of women in the violence, and a refusal to look away.

The poems do not argue a political case. They speak in a direct, personal voice about loss, love and memory, and about women who bear the heaviest cost when societies break apart. That plainness is part of why the collection has lasted: readers in India and Pakistan have read it in the same way for seventy years, as poetry about their own families' experience rather than about one side's version of history.

Why did Sunehre win the Sahitya Akademi Award?

The award, given in 1956, recognised Sunehre as the outstanding Punjabi book of its year. It was the first time the Sahitya Akademi, India's national academy of letters, had honoured a woman writer, and Pritam remains the first woman to have received the award for a work in Punjabi. The honour mattered beyond the prize itself: it put a Punjabi woman poet at the centre of Indian literature at a time when few women writers were recognised at all, and it fixed Sunehre as the book by which Pritam's poetry would be judged.

ਲੇਖਕ

Amrita Pritam (1919 to 2005) was the leading woman writer of twentieth-century Punjabi literature. Her first collection, Amrit Lehran, appeared in 1936, when she was sixteen. She wrote more than a hundred books across six decades: poems, novels, essays, folk songs and autobiography. Her most noted novel, Pinjar (1950), tells the story of a woman abducted during Partition and was made into an award-winning film in 2003. She worked at All India Radio in Delhi until 1961 and edited the Punjabi literary magazine Nagmani with the artist Imroz, her partner for the last forty years of her life, for thirty-three years.

The honours came steadily after Sunehre: the Padma Shri in 1969, the Bharatiya Jnanpith in 1982 for her later poetry collection Kagaz Te Canvas, and the Padma Vibhushan and the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship, the academy's highest honour, both in 2004. She was nominated to the Rajya Sabha, India's upper house of parliament, from 1986 to 1992. She died in Delhi on 31 October 2005, aged eighty-six.

Reception and legacy

Sunehre has never gone out of print in Punjabi, and its poems are still recited at literary gatherings on both sides of the border. In 2007 the lyricist Gulzar released an audio album of her poems recited by him, and on her hundredth birth anniversary in 2019 Google marked the day with a Doodle celebrating a writer who, in its words, dared to live the life she imagined. For readers coming to Pritam for the first time, Sunehre remains the place to start: the book where her voice, and the voice of a Punjab torn in two, is clearest.