Amrita Pritam (1919-2005) was the preeminent female Punjabi writer, equally beloved on both sides of the Pakistan-India border.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica. Today’s storyteller is a prolific poet and novelist. The preeminent female Punjabi writer, she was equally beloved on both sides of the Pakistan-India border.
We’re talking about Amrita Pritam.
Amrita Kaur [Kor] was born in 1919 in Punjab Pakistan. It is likely from her father that Amrita developed her connection with literature. In addition to being a leader of the Sikh faith, he was also a poet, scholar and occasional editor of a literary journal.
When Amrita was eleven, her mother died. The tragedy of losing her mom at such a young age spurred Amrita to write. She found solace and comfort in the art form, and by age sixteen, she published her first anthology of poems: Amrit Lehran, or, Immortal Waves.
That same year, in 1936, Amrita married a much older man to whom she’d been engaged since early childhood, Pritam Singh. Amrita published a new collection of poetry each year for the first six years of their marriage. Later on, their deeply unhappy union would inform much of her work.
But first, Amrita’s themes shifted from romance to war and state violence in the early 1940s. Amrita became part of the Progressive Writers’ Movement. Her thoughts on the war-torn economy and the Bengal famine are reflected in her 1944 collection, Lok Peed - or People’s Anguish.
In 1947, the former British India was partitioned into two states: India and Pakistan. Roughly one million Musims, Hindus and Sikhs died in the violence that followed the partition. As a Sikh woman, the violence made Amrita a refugee. So at the age of 28, she migrated to New Delhi.
She expressed the anguish of leaving her home in what is now her most iconic poem: Aj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu (Today I invoke Waris Shah – "Ode to Waris Shah"). The poem is an elegy to the 18th-century Punjabi poet, Waris Shah, with whom Amrita shares a birthplace.
Following the partition, Amrita’s success continued to grow. In 1950, she published her novel Pinjar - or The Skeleton. The novel explores themes of fate, violence against women, loss of humanity and existentialism. The novel was so successful that it was adopted into an award-winning film in 2003.
In 1960, after having two children together, Amrita divorced her husband. It was in the years leading up to and shortly following her divorce that her writing became distinctly feminist. Her work from that time documents her unhappy marriage and the events leading up to her split with Pritam. Around this same time, Amrita’s work was translated into a wide variety of languages including English, Danish, French and Mandarin. She also wrote several autobiographical pieces including Black Rose and Rasidi Ticket.
Rasidi Ticket depicted Amrita’s several decade long unrequited love for the poet Sahir Ludhianvi. While Amrita did not find relationship bliss with Sahir, she did ultimately find a life long companionship with the renowned writer and artist, Imroz. While the two never married, Imroz and Amrita spent the last forty years of her life together. He designed many of her book jacket covers and she was the muse for several of his paintings. Their life together is the captured in the book Amrita Imroz: A Love Story.
Later in life, Amrita’s work became more spiritual in nature. She turned to the spiritual leader Osho, who you may remember from the Netflix series Wild, Wild Country. She wrote several introductions to his books.
Recognition for Amrita’s wide body of work poured in throughout her lifetime.
In addition to many translations, stage and screen adaptations, Amrita enjoyed a series of honors. She was the first recipient of the Punjab Rattan Award and the first woman to receive the Sahitya Akademi Award for literature in 1956. She later earned India’s highest literary award in 1982 and India’s second highest civilian honor in 2004. That same year, in 2004, she was given the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship, a lifetime achievement award that recognizes the “immortals of literature”.
Perhaps the most important voice for women in Punjabi literature, her six decade career yielded over 100 books of poetry, essays, fiction, folk songs and autobiographies.
After a long fight with illness, Amrita died in her sleep in New Delhi on October 31, 2005. She was 86 years old.
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