Amrita Pritam

Amrita Pritam was born Amrit Kaur on August 31, 1919, in Gujranwala, a town in the Punjab province of British India that now lies in Pakistan ^[1]. She was the only child of Raj Bibi, a schoolteacher, and Kartar Singh Hitkari, a poet, scholar, and editor of a literary journal who was also a preacher in the Sikh tradition. Verse ran in the household, and her father taught her the conventions of metre and rhyme while she was still a girl ^[2].

Her childhood was cut short by grief. Her mother died when Amrita was about eleven, and the family moved to Lahore, then the cultural capital of undivided Punjab. She later wrote that the loss shook her early religious faith and pushed her toward writing as a way of ordering a world that had stopped making sense ^[2]. Left to manage a household at an age when most children were still at school, she matured quickly and read widely.

She began composing poems in her early teens. Her first collection, Amrit Lehran (Immortal Waves), appeared in 1936, when she was sixteen ^[1]. That same year she entered an arranged marriage with Pritam Singh, the son of a Lahore hosiery merchant to whom she had been engaged in childhood, and adopted the name Amrita Pritam, under which all her mature work would appear ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Amrita Pritam in the Lahore of the late 1930s would have been told about a startlingly young poet publishing collection after collection. Half a dozen volumes of her verse came out between 1936 and 1943 ^[1]. Her early poems were conventionally romantic, but her outlook changed as she came into contact with the Progressive Writers' Movement, a loose association of South Asian authors committed to social reform. The shift showed in Lok Peed (People's Anguish, 1944), which criticised a war-strained economy and responded to the Bengal famine of 1943 ^[3]. She also worked for a period at Lahore's radio station, which gave her voice a public reach unusual for a woman of her generation ^[2].

The Partition of India in 1947 was the fracture around which much of her later work formed. Communal violence killed hundreds of thousands of people in Punjab, and an estimated ten million or more were uprooted on both sides of the new border ^[4]. Amrita Pritam, pregnant with her son, left Lahore for Dehradun and then Delhi, becoming a refugee in the country whose independence had just been declared.

Out of that journey came the poem by which she is still best known, Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu (Today I Invoke Waris Shah). Addressed to the eighteenth-century Punjabi Sufi poet who wrote the tragic romance of Heer and Ranjha, it summons him from the grave to witness a Punjab where, the poet says, a million daughters now weep. The lament crossed the new border with remarkable speed and was recited and treasured in Pakistan as much as in India, one of the very few literary works claimed with equal feeling by both halves of divided Punjab ^[4].

Any honest account of Amrita Pritam achievements has to begin with Pinjar (The Skeleton), her 1950 novel about Puro, a Hindu girl abducted by a Muslim man in the years before Partition ^[5]. Written when almost no one was telling the Partition story through women's eyes, the book examined abduction, forced conversion, and the cold reception awaiting women who tried to return to their families. It was translated into English by the writer Khushwant Singh and adapted in 2003 into an award-winning Hindi film directed by Chandra Prakash Dwivedi ^[5].

Recognition from India's literary establishment followed steadily. In 1956 she received the Sahitya Akademi Award for Sunehade (Messages), a long poem of love and longing, and she is generally recorded as the first woman to win the award in Punjabi ^[1]. In 1982 came the Bharatiya Jnanpith, India's highest literary honour, for Kagaz Te Canvas (Paper and Canvas) ^[6]. The state added its own tributes: the Padma Shri in 1969 and the Padma Vibhushan, the country's second highest civilian award, in 2004 ^[6]. She was also honoured by the Sahitya Akademi with its Fellowship, reserved for what the body calls the immortals of literature, and received international recognition including an award from Bulgaria and honours from France ^[3].

The scale of her output matched the honours. Across a career of more than sixty years she published, by most counts, around a hundred books: poetry, novels, short stories, essays, and autobiographical writing, translated into many Indian and foreign languages ^[1]. From 1966 she also edited Nagmani, a monthly Punjabi literary magazine she ran with the artist Imroz for over three decades, which became a nursery for younger Punjabi writers ^[3]. In 1986 she was nominated to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India's Parliament, where she served a six-year term ^[6].

Her private life was as unconventional as her books, and she wrote about it with a candour that scandalised and fascinated readers in equal measure. Her marriage to Pritam Singh produced two children, a son and a daughter, but the relationship was unhappy, and the couple formally separated in 1960 ^[2]. Divorce was rare in her milieu, and rarer still was a woman prepared to name her reasons in print.

For years she carried an unreciprocated love for the poet and film lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi, an attachment she described openly in her autobiography Rasidi Ticket (The Revenue Stamp, 1976) ^[2]. The book's title came from a barbed remark by Khushwant Singh that her life story was so slight it could fit on the back of a revenue stamp; she took the jibe and made it her banner. The memoir's frankness about desire, loneliness, and faith made it one of the most discussed autobiographies in any Indian language ^[2].

The most durable relationship of her life was with the painter Inderjeet Singh, known as Imroz, several years her junior. From the mid 1960s until her death they shared a home in Delhi's Hauz Khas without ever marrying, a partnership of more than four decades that itself became part of Indian literary lore ^[7]. Imroz designed the covers of many of her books, edited Nagmani alongside her, and cared for her through her final illness. Their letters were later published, and he continued to write poems addressed to her after her death ^[7].

Age did not slow her pen. Through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s she kept producing poetry and prose, adding further autobiographical volumes, among them Aksharon Ke Saye (Shadows of Words), and continuing to edit Nagmani until the magazine closed in 2002 ^[3]. Her later poetry moved inward, occupied with dreams, mortality, and a searching, unorthodox spirituality shaped in part by her interest in the teachings of Osho, for some of whose books she wrote introductions ^[3].

Honours kept arriving late into her life. The Padma Vibhushan came in 2004, when she was 85 and already in poor health, and in the same period the Sahitya Akademi conferred its Fellowship on her ^[6]. In 2005, Delhi University was among the institutions that had recognised her with an honorary doctorate, joining Jabalpur University and Vishwa Bharati ^[3].

A long illness confined her to bed during her final years, with Imroz as her constant attendant. Amrita Pritam died in her sleep at her Delhi home on October 31, 2005, at the age of 86 ^[1]. Tributes came from both India and Pakistan, where her Partition elegy had never stopped circulating, and obituaries in the international press ranked her among the essential South Asian writers of the twentieth century ^[4].

Amrita Pritam's central achievement was to open Punjabi poetry, until then dominated almost entirely by men, to a woman's voice speaking on her own terms. Critics routinely describe her as the first major woman poet of the Punjabi language, and generations of writers, in Punjabi and beyond, have cited her example ^[1]. Her insistence on writing about the female body, desire, and the specific sufferings of women during Partition widened what Indian literature could say.

Her work continues to travel. Pinjar remains a set text in Partition studies, Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu is recited at commemorations on both sides of the border, and her books circulate in translation in English, French, Japanese, and many other languages ^[5]. On August 31, 2019, the centenary of her birth, Google marked the occasion with a Doodle in India honouring her life and work ^[8]. Films, plays, and songs keep returning to her poems, and her late lyric Main Tainu Phir Milangi (I Will Meet You Again), addressed to Imroz, has acquired a devoted afterlife of its own ^[7].

For readers meeting her for the first time, the essential Amrita Pritam facts are quickly told: a girl from Gujranwala who published at sixteen, a refugee who gave Partition its most famous lament, a novelist who put abducted women at the centre of the national story, and the first woman to collect Punjabi literature's highest prizes ^[6]. Any full Amrita Pritam biography, though, ends where she wanted it to end: with the conviction, stated in her final poem, that neither love nor the written word is finished by death.