ਅੰਮ੍ਰਿਤਾ ਪ੍ਰੀਤਮਅੰਮ੍ਰਿਤਾ ਪ੍ਰੀਤਮ

Amrita Pritam (1919 to 2005) was a Punjabi poet, novelist and essayist born in Gujranwala, in what is now Pakistan, and the first woman to win the Sahitya Akademi Award. She wrote in Punjabi and Hindi for almost seventy years and published more than a hundred books. Her Partition poem 'Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu' and her novel Pinjar made her the best known woman's voice in modern Punjabi literature, loved on both sides of the India and Pakistan border.

Early life in Gujranwala and Lahore

She was born Amrit Kaur on 31 August 1919 in Gujranwala, a city in undivided Punjab that now lies in Pakistan. She was the only child of Raj Bibi, a school teacher, and Kartar Singh Hitkari, a poet and a scholar of Braj Bhasha who edited a literary journal and preached the Sikh faith. Books, verse and argument were part of daily life in her childhood home, and she grew up listening to the language of poetry before she ever wrote a line of her own.

Her mother died when Amrita was eleven. The loss left her lonely and carrying adult responsibilities early, and she and her father moved to Lahore, the literary capital of undivided Punjab. She began writing as a schoolgirl, and her first collection of poems, Amrit Lehran (Immortal Waves), appeared in 1936, when she was sixteen. She had been engaged in childhood to Pritam Singh, an editor from a hosiery merchant family of Lahore's Anarkali Bazaar, and married him in her teens, taking the name Amrita Pritam, the name the world would know her by. Half a dozen poetry collections followed between 1936 and 1943, written first in a romantic vein.

From romance to the Progressive Writers

The romantic poet did not stay romantic for long. Amrita Pritam became part of the Progressive Writers' Movement, and its mark shows clearly in Lok Peed (The People's Anguish, 1944), a collection that openly criticised the war-torn economy after the Bengal famine of 1943. Before Partition she also worked for a time at the Lahore radio station. After Independence she threw herself into social work in Delhi, helping the activist Guru Radha Kishan set up the first Janta Library, a study centre inaugurated by Balraj Sahni and Aruna Asaf Ali that still runs at the Clock Tower in old Delhi.

Partition and 'Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu'

Partition in 1947 cut her life in two. She left Lahore for India as a refugee at the age of twenty-eight, one of millions displaced by the division of Punjab. On that journey, travelling from Dehradun to Delhi while pregnant with her son, she wrote down the anguish around her as a poem: 'Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu', Today I call on Waris Shah. It is addressed to Waris Shah, the eighteenth-century poet of Heer Ranjha who came from her own home region, and it asks him to rise from his grave, see a Punjab strewn with corpses and a Chenab running with blood, and add a new page to his book of love.

The poem travelled faster than any book could. It was read aloud, sung and printed on both sides of the new border, and it became the best known Punjabi lament for Partition. The Guardian's obituary later noted that her verses were sung and recited in cities and villages by many who could not read, and that she had given a voice to the anguish of the Punjabi people as a whole. Partition made her a refugee; the poem made her Punjab's public conscience, and she remained as popular in Pakistan as in India for the rest of her life.

Major works: Pinjar and a hundred books

Her novel Pinjar (The Skeleton, 1950) is the cornerstone of her fiction. It follows Puro, a young Hindu woman abducted in the violence around Partition, and traces what abduction, forced marriage and rejection by her own family do to a woman's identity. Written with a starkness unusual for its time, it is still one of the defining works on what Partition cost women. Chandra Prakash Dwivedi turned it into an award-winning Hindi film, Pinjar, in 2003. Hers was not the first of her books on screen: Dharti Sagar te Sippiyan had been filmed earlier as Kadambari in 1975.

Across a career of more than six decades she published over a hundred books: by one count, 28 novels, 18 anthologies of prose, five collections of short stories and 16 other prose volumes, besides her poetry. Her autobiographies are among her most read books, candid about love, marriage and defiance of convention: Kala Gulab (Black Rose, 1968), Rasidi Ticket (Revenue Stamp, 1976), which tells among other things of her unrequited love for the poet Sahir Ludhianvi, and Aksharon ke Saayee (Shadows of Words, 2004). After her marriage ended in 1960, her writing turned more openly feminist, and many of her stories and poems drew on that unhappy experience. Her work has been translated into English, French, Danish, Japanese, Mandarin and many Indian languages.

Delhi was her base for this long career. She worked in the Punjabi service of All India Radio in Delhi until 1961, and for more than three decades she edited Nagmani, a Punjabi literary monthly, together with the artist and writer Imroz, who designed most of her book covers and made her the subject of many paintings. In later years she also wrote on spiritual themes and dreams, in works such as Kaal Chetna (Time Consciousness) and Agyat Ka Nimantran (Call of the Unknown), and wrote introductions to several books of Osho, including Ek Onkar Satnam.

What is Amrita Pritam's most famous work?

Amrita Pritam's most famous work depends on the form: as a poem, 'Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu', her 1947 lament addressed to Waris Shah, is the single most quoted poem in Punjabi. As fiction, the novel Pinjar (1950) is her best known book, read across India and Pakistan and filmed in 2003. Poets would add a third name, the long poem Sunehade (Messages), which won her the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1956 and made literary history for a woman writing in Punjabi.

Honours and later life

Recognition came early and kept coming for fifty years. In 1956 she became the first woman to receive the Sahitya Akademi Award, for Sunehade. The Padma Shri followed in 1969, and the Bharatiya Jnanpith, India's highest literary honour, came for Kagaz te Canvas (Paper and Canvas). She was the first recipient of the Punjab Rattan Award. Abroad, Bulgaria gave her the Vaptsarov Award in 1979 and the French government named her an Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1987. She served as a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha from 1986 to 1992, received honorary doctorates from universities including Delhi, Jabalpur and Visva Bharati, and in 2004 she received both the Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian honour, and the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship, the academy's highest award for a lifetime of writing.

Honour also came from the land she had left. Towards the end of her life Pakistan's Punjabi Academy honoured her, and Punjabi poets of Pakistan sent her a chaddar from the tombs of Waris Shah, Bulleh Shah and Sultan Bahu. She spent the last forty years of her life in Delhi with Imroz, her companion after she left her husband in 1960. She died in her sleep in New Delhi on 31 October 2005, aged eighty-six, after a long illness, and her death was mourned on both sides of the border she had crossed as a young refugee.

Legacy

Amrita Pritam broke the mould of what a woman writer in Punjabi could be: romantic without apology, political without slogans, and honest about her own life in an age that punished women for honesty. Her books are taught in India and Pakistan alike, her Partition poem is still the lines Punjabis reach for when the events of 1947 are remembered, and Puro of Pinjar remains a touchstone for writing about women and violence. In 2007 the lyricist Gulzar released an album reciting her poems, and on 31 August 2019 Google marked her hundredth birth anniversary with a Doodle, calling her one of history's foremost female Punjabi writers who dared to live the life she imagined.