Amrita Pritam

Pritam is best remembered for her poignant poem, Ajj aakhaan Waris Shah nu (Today I invoke Waris Shah – "Ode to Waris Shah"), an elegy to the 18th-century Punjabi poet, and an expression of her anguish over massacres during the partition of British India. As a novelist, her most noted work was Pinjar ("The Skeleton", 1950), in which she created her memorable character, Puro, an epitome of violence against women, loss of humanity and ultimate surrender to existential fate; the novel was made into an award-winning film, Pinjar (2003).

When British India was partitioned into the independent states of India and Pakistan in 1947, she migrated from Lahore to India, though she remained equally popular in Pakistan throughout her life.

Pritam's magnum opus, the long poem Sunehade, won her the 1956 Sahitya Akademi Award, making her the first and the only woman to have been given the award for a work in Punjabi. She received the Jnanpith Award, one of India's highest literary awards, in 1982 for Kagaz Te Canvas ("The Paper and the Canvas"). She was awarded the Padma Shri in 1969, and the Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian award, in 2004. In that same year she was honoured with India's highest literary award given by the Sahitya Akademi (India's Academy of Letters), the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship, awarded to the "immortals of literature" for lifetime achievement.

Biography

Background

Amrita Pritam was born as Amrit Kaur in 1919 in Gujranwala, Punjab, in British India into a Sikh family. She was the only child of Raj Bibi, a school teacher, and Kartar Singh Hitkari, a poet and a scholar of the Braj Bhasha language, and the editor of a literary journal. Besides this, he was a pracharak – a preacher of the Sikh faith. Amrita's mother died when she was eleven. Soon after, she and her father moved to Lahore, where she lived till her migration to India in 1947. Confronting adult responsibilities and besieged by loneliness following her mother's death, she began to write at an early age. Her first anthology of poems, Amrit Lehran ("Immortal Waves") was published in 1936, at age sixteen, the year she married Pritam Singh, an editor to whom she was engaged in early childhood and changed her name from Amrit Kaur to Amrita Pritam. Half a dozen collections of poems followed between 1936 and 1943.

Though she began her journey as a romantic poet, she soon shifted gears, and became part of the Progressive Writers' Movement. The effect was seen in her collection, Lok Peed ("People's Anguish", 1944), which openly criticised the war-torn economy after the Bengal famine of 1943. She was also involved in social work to a certain extent, and participated in such activities wholeheartedly after Independence, when social activist Guru Radha Kishan took the initiative to bring the first Janta Library in Delhi. This was inaugurated by Balraj Sahni and Aruna Asaf Ali, and she contributed to the occasion. This study centre cum library is still running at Clock Tower, Delhi. She also worked at a radio station in Lahore for a while, before the partition of India.

M. S. Sathyu, the director of the partition movie Garam Hava (1973), paid a theatrical tribute to her through his performance 'Ek Thee Amrita'.

Partition of India

One million people, Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims died in communal violence that followed the partition of India in 1947, and left Amrita Pritam a Punjabi refugee at age 28, when she left Lahore and moved to New Delhi. Subsequently, in 1947, while she was pregnant with her son, and traveling from Dehradun to Delhi, she expressed anguish on a piece of paper like the poem, "Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu" (I ask Waris Shah Today); this poem was to later immortalize her and become the most poignant reminder of the horrors of Partition. The poem was addressed to the 18th-century Sufi poet Waris Shah, author of the tragic saga of Heer and Ranjha and with whom she shares her birthplace.

Amrita Pritam worked until 1961 in the Punjabi service of All India Radio, Delhi. After her divorce in 1960, her work became more feminist. Many of her stories and poems drew on the unhappy experience of her marriage. A number of her works have been translated into English, French, Danish, Japanese, Mandarin, and other languages from Punjabi and Urdu, including her autobiographical works Black Rose and Rasidi Ticket (Revenue Stamp).

The first of Amrita Pritam's books to be filmed was Dharti Sagar te Sippiyan, as Kadambari (1975), followed by Unah Di Kahani, as Daaku (Dacoit, 1976), directed by Basu Bhattacharya. Her novel Pinjar (The Skeleton, 1950) narrates the story of partition riots along with the crisis of women who suffered during the times. It was made into an award-winning Hindi movie by Chandra Prakash Dwivedi, because of its humanism: "Amritaji has portrayed the suffering of people of both the countries." Pinjar was shot in a border region of Rajasthan and Punjab.

She edited Nagmani, a monthly literary magazine in Punjabi for several years, which she ran together with Imroz, for 33 years; though after Partition she wrote prolifically in Hindi as well. Later in life, she turned to Osho and wrote introductions for several books of Osho, including Ek Onkar Satnam, and also started writing on spiritual themes and dreams, producing works like Kaal Chetna ("Time Consciousness") and Agyat Ka Nimantran ("Call of the Unknown"). She had also published autobiographies, titled, Kala Gulab ("Black Rose", 1968), Rasidi Ticket ("The Revenue Stamp", 1976), and Aksharon kay Saayee ("Shadows of Words").