Amrita Pritam

She was betrothed in childhood to Pritam Singh, the son of a hosiery merchant. He grew up to be an editor and they were married in 1936. The couple had two children. The marriage was a troubled one and she left her husband in 1960.

She was said to have been in love with the poet Sahir Ludhianvi and had written about him in her autobiography, ‘Rasidi Ticket’ (Revenue Stamp).

She developed a long term relationship with the famous artist and writer Imroz with whom she lived for the last 40 years of her life.

She was born as Amrita Kaur on 31 August 1919, in Gujranwala, Punjab in undivided British India. She was the only child of Kartar Singh and Raj Bibi, a Sikh couple. Her father was a school teacher and a poet. She grew up in a spiritual environment and inherited her love for writing from her father.

Her family was very religious as her father was also a “pracharak”—a preacher of the Sikh religion. Her orthodox grandmother used separate sets of utensils to serve Hindus and Muslims. From a young age Amrita was a critical thinker and opposed such practices.

Tragedy struck her family when her mother died when Amrita was just 11 years old. The little girl had prayed desperately to God to save her mother and stopped praying when her mother died in spite of her prayers.

She moved to Lahore with her father and found herself overburdened with household chores. She felt very sad and lonely and sought solace in writing.

Her first anthology of poems ‘Amrit Lehran’ (Immortal Waves) was published in 1936 when she was 16 years old. She also got married around this time and changed her name to Amrita Pritam.

Once she started writing in 1936, she prolifically continued composing several poems and had published six collections of poems by 1943.

Initially she used to write romantic poems though she gradually became attracted to the Progressive Writers’ Movement, a literary movement in the pre-partition British India and became a part of it.

In 1944, her poetry collection ‘Lok Peed’ (People’s Anguish) was published in which she criticized the war-torn economy in the aftermath of the Bengal famine of 1943. She was developing into a bold writer who expressed herself freely without any fear of the consequences.

She became involved in social work in the mid-1940s and worked with the Lahore Radio Station for a while.

She witnessed unspeakable horrors in front of her eyes when the partition of India took place in 1947. More than one million people—Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus—died horrible deaths in the communal riots. Amrita, a young woman of 28 somehow escaped getting killed, but her soul was shattered in the experience.

Her most famous novel is ‘Pinjar’ (Skeleton), a Punjabi novel which tells the story of a Hindu girl, Puro who is abducted by a Muslim boy and denounced by her own family when she escapes and returns to them. This work established her as a voice for the women who suffered immeasurable hardships during the partition.