Amrita Pritam

Punjab's first great woman poet — she called Waris Shah back from the grave. Amrita Pritam (1919–2005), born Amrit Kaur on 31 August 1919 at Gujranwala in undivided Punjab, was the first great woman's voice of modern Punjabi literature — poet, novelist, essayist and autobiographer, equally loved on both sides of the border Partition drew through her homeland. The only child of Raj Bibi, a schoolteacher, and Kartar Singh Hitkari, a poet, scholar of Braj Bhasha and Sikh preacher who edited a literary journal, she grew up among books; her mother died when she was eleven, and father and daughter moved to Lahore, where she lived until 1947. Her first collection, Amrit Lehran (Immortal Waves), appeared in 1936, when she was sixteen — the year she married Pritam Singh, an editor to whom she had been engaged since childhood, taking the name Amrita Pritam. Half a dozen collections followed before 1943, and with Lok Peed (People's Anguish, 1944) she joined the Progressive Writers' Movement, writing of war, famine and the people's pain. Partition made her a refugee at twenty-eight: leaving Lahore for Delhi in 1947, pregnant with her son and travelling from Dehradun, she wrote on a scrap of paper the poem that made her immortal — "Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu", calling on the eighteenth-century poet of Heer Ranjha to rise from his grave and turn a new page in the book of love, because a million daughters of Punjab were weeping where one had wept before. Her novel Pinjar (The Skeleton, 1950) told Partition through a woman's suffering, and was filmed in 2003. She worked in the Punjabi service of All India Radio until 1961; after her divorce in 1960 she wrote more openly as a feminist, and from 1966 edited the monthly Nagmani with the painter Imroz, her companion for the last forty years of her life. Her long poem Sunehade won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1956 — the first woman to win it for a Punjabi work — and Kagaz te Canvas brought the Jnanpith Award in 1982; she received the Padma Shri in 1969 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2004, and sat in the Rajya Sabha from 1986 to 1992. She wrote more than a hundred books in Punjabi and Hindi. She died in her sleep in New Delhi on 31 October 2005, aged eighty-six.