Amrita Pritamਅੰਮ੍ਰਿਤਾ ਪ੍ਰੀਤਮ

Early life

Amrita Pritam was born Amrit Kaur on 31 August 1919 in Gujranwala, in undivided Punjab. Her father, Kartar Singh Hitkari, was a poet and scholar of Braj Bhasha; her mother died when she was eleven, and she moved with her father to Lahore.

She began writing young. Her first collection of poems, Amrit Lehran, was published in 1936, when she was sixteen, the same year she married Pritam Singh, whose name she took.

Partition

In 1947 she left Lahore for India as a refugee. On the journey she wrote ‘Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu’ (Today I call on Waris Shah), addressed to the 18th-century poet of Heer, asking him to rise from his grave and write of the women of Punjab.

The poem was read and sung on both sides of the new border and remains the best-known Punjabi lament for Partition.

Writing

Her novel Pinjar (1950) follows Puro, a young woman abducted in the years around Partition, and is one of the defining works on what Partition did to women. She went on to write more than a hundred books of poetry, fiction, essays and memoir.

For many years she worked for the Punjabi service of All India Radio. Her autobiography, Rasidi Ticket (1976), is among her most widely read books.

Honours

She was the first woman to receive the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1956, for Sunehade. She received the Jnanpith Award in 1981 for Kagaz te Canvas, the Padma Shri in 1969 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2004.

She served as a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha from 1986 to 1992. She died in New Delhi on 31 October 2005.

Later life and legacy

After her marriage ended she lived in Delhi with the painter and poet Imroz for more than four decades. Together they edited the Punjabi literary monthly Nagmani.

Her work has been translated into many Indian and foreign languages and is studied in Punjabi literature courses in India and Pakistan.