Amrita Pritam

Amrita Pritam (; 31 August 1919 – 31 October 2005) was an Indian novelist, essayist and poet, who wrote in Punjabi and Hindi. A prominent figure in Punjabi literature, she is the recipient of the 1956 Sahitya Akademi Award. Her body of work comprised over 100 books of poetry, fiction, biographies, essays, a collection of Punjabi folk songs and an autobiography that were all translated into several Indian and foreign languages.

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, an expression of her anguish over massacres during the partition of 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 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, as compared to her contemporaries like Mohan Singh and Shiv Kumar Batalvi.

Pritam's magnum opus, a 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.Amrita Pritam
''Modern Indian Literature: an Anthology'', by K. M. George, Sahitya Akademi. 1992, .''945–947''. She later received the Bharatiya Jnanpith, one of India's highest literary awards, in 1982 for ''Kagaz Te Canvas'' ("The Paper and the Canvas"). The Padma Shri came her way in 1969 and finally, Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian award, in 2004, and in the 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 given to ''the "immortals of literature"'' for lifetime achievement. she wrote her poems mostly for the partition

Biography

Background

Amrita Pritam was born as Amrit Kaur in 1919 in Gujranwala, Punjab, in British India,Amrita Pritam – Obituary
''The Guardian'', 4 November 2005. the only child of Raj Bibi, who was a school teacher, and Kartar Singh Hitkari, who was a poet, 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, soon she shifted gears, and became part of the Progressive Writers' Movement and its 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, which was inaugurated by Balraj Sahni and Aruna Asaf Ali and contributed to the occasion accordingly. 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 from 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 travelling 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 addressed to the Sufi poet Waris Shah, author of the tragic saga of Heer and Ranjah 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

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