Amrita Pritam never woke up on the afternoon of October
31, 2005 and the world is emptier without her
musings. She embodied the fullness of poetic expression,
creativity and the intensity of a woman in the perpetual state of
love. Amrita’s voice was rooted in the South Asian idiom with all
its contradictions, diversity and a faint recognition of fate. Her
remarkable affinity with the depths of the Punjabi language adds
to her iconoclastic status in India, Pakistan and wherever Punjabi
is spoken and appreciated. Yet her audience has been global as
well: her work was translated into dozens of world languages.
One of her poems makes the following confession:
Today I have erased the number of my house
And removed the stain of identity on my street’s forehead
And I have wiped the direction on each road
But if you really want to meet me
Then knock at the doors of every country
Every city, every street
And wherever a glimpse of a free spirit exists
That will be my home
(translation by author)
Through the course of her life, this ‘free spirit’ generated
controversy but she never concerned herself with the mundane.
Outspoken, prolific and deeply spiritual, Amrita existed within
self-defined, non-conformist parameters. She lived with her
partner for 41 years, shunned religious and sectarian identities
and rejected the political divide of the left and right:
No absolutes for something as relative as a human life
No rules for something so tender as a heart..
Amrita was born in 1919 in the Gujranwala district and educated
in Lahore. Her first collection of poetry, Amrit Lehran (Ripples
of Nectar) was published in 1936 when she was hardly 17. By the
early 1940s, five collections of her poetry had been published.
However, it was in the tragic turn of events during Partition that
Amrita’s poetic genius found the real groundswell of expression.
Her meteoric fame is often ascribed to the masterpiece poem “Aj
Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu” when a neo-Heer emerged on the literary
landscape of the Punjab during the 1947 trauma. This poem,
addressed to Waris Shah – the author of the Punjabi epic of
immortal love, Heer Ranjha – summed up the anguish of millions,
particularly women in the Punjab who suffered a disproportionate
share of the tragedy.
I say to Waris Shah today, speak from your grave
And add a new page to your book of love
Once one daughter of Punjab wept, and you wrote your long saga;
Today thousands weep, calling to you Waris Shah:
Arise, o friend of the afflicted; arise and see the state of
Punjab,
Corpses strewn on fields, and the Chenaab flowing with much blood.
Someone filled the five rivers with poison,
And this same water now irrigates our soil.
Where was lost the flute, where the songs of love sounded?
And all Ranjha’s brothers forgot to play the flute.
Blood has rained on the soil, graves are oozing with blood,
The princesses of love cry their hearts out in the graveyards.
Today all the Quaidos have become the thieves of love and beauty,
Where can we find another one like Waris Shah?
Waris Shah! I say to you, speak from your grave
And add a new page to your book of love.
(Translation by Darshan Singh Maini)
Amrita’s childhood was marked by her mother’s death and later,
during her adolescence, she faced stiff resistance from her father
about composing poetry since he disapproved of her unconventional
pursuits. Nevertheless, her rebellious nature resisted this
pressure and continued to blossom, finding new meanings within her
self. Amrita’s poetry represents a woman completely in love with
the pleasure and suffering that follow in wake of the total
surrender of the self.
It is in this context that her most well known passion – for the
famous Urdu poet Sahir Ludhianvi – typifies her ability to ‘feel’
with abandon and not be ashamed about it. Her obsession for Sahir
intensified while she was living with Imroze, the eminent Indian
artist who was Amrita’s partner until her death. By the early
1960s, Amrita had liberated herself from an unhappy marriage and
found a complete companion in Imroze. Her post-modern
autobiography, Raseedi Ticket (Revenue Stamp) details her love for
Sahir and inspires any ordinary mortal to rise above his/herself.
In fact, in her books, her son questions whether he was Sahir’s
son. While Amrita tells him that his father was Pritam Singh, she
also narrates how she used to look at the flower pots in her house
and see Sahir’s countenance each time the plants moved. This
honest expression of her desire for Sahir was a rare female voice.
Amrita precedes Fehmida Riaz, Parveen Shakir and other leading
South Asian female poets by setting standards of candour and
purity of feeling. In her autobiography, she mentions how she
would collect the cigarette butts discarded by Sahir. Amrita would
re-light them and smoke the leftover tobacco to sense Sahir’s
touch. She wrote his name hundreds of times on a sheet of paper
while addressing a press conference; after his death, Amrita
yearned that the smoke-filled air would travel to the other world
and meet Sahir! Confronted with this passion, Sahir appears to be
a somewhat (emotionally) impotent despite being a great poet in
his own right. Years later, Amrita wrote:
There was a grief I smoked
in silence, like a cigarette
only a few poems fell
out of the ash I flicked from it
(Translated by Jennifer Barber and
Irfan Malik)
After
Partition, India gave much recognition to her creativity, starting
with her being nominated for the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award
in 1956. Her poems are fresh, sensuous, spontaneous and present a
modern sensibility on love. Amrita’s success and stature grew,
with India and, in fact, the world bestowing upon her honours that
unfortunately we in Pakistan seldom present to our great poets and
writers. She won the Padma Shri in 1969; the Jnanpeeth Award in
1982 and was nominated for the Rajya Sabha (upper house) during
the period between 1986-92. In the 1990s she also received the
Padma Vibhushan and writer of the millennium award. In all, she
wrote more than 75 books: her diverse literary ensemble consists
of 28 novels, 18 compilations of verse, 5 anthologies of short
stories and 16 publications of essays and articles.
Several of her stories were turned into Bollywood films; a
recent Indian movie, Pinjar (skeleton), was based on her novel
bearing the same name (Pinjar was translated into French and also
received the La Route des Indes Literary Prize in 2004).The film
was well-acclaimed and won several awards, while its central,
human message remains valid as the plot revolves around the
kidnapped girls of rival communities. Paro and Lajjo are
characters symbolising thousands of Muslim, Hindu and Sikh women
who faced abduction and rejection by families since they stood
defiled. In fact Amrita’s characters encapsulate the politics of
female sexuality and question gendered identities in an immediate
political context.
Remarkably, the narrative never gets ideological and reinforces
the commonality of human experience. Written against the backdrop
of common suffering, A Needle of Light echoes:
Our destiny has been tattered
There are torn patches in sight
My country now requires
A needle of the Light.
I was repairing my phulkari
With a needle to thread
But the earth shook
With a great fright
And broke my needle
The needle of the light.
(translation from
www.punjabgovt.nic.in)
Amrita Pritam lived her intense life in dreams and inspired by
them, composed her poetry. For her, dreams were a “contact with
realities in another dimension.” Her autobiographical work Black
Rose was the first chronicle of dreams and later, her essays and
prose were replete with her intense travels within her self. Her
spiritual reawakening was also guided by dreams. In many ways, the
vividness and expanse of her dreams explains the range of her
literary output as well as the continuous psychoanalytic
exploration of the self.
Some years ago, the well known Indian critic Suresh Kohli
expounded further in Amrita’s words: “Once someone asked me in the
course of a television interview: ‘How will I define who and what
Amrita Pritam is?’ I laughed and said it is the name of a yatra, a
journey, a travelogue of evolution, an odyssey of inner growth . .
. there are immense possibilities and various faculties in a human
being. And whatever I have written has been an attempt to arouse
those submerged feelings.”
Her odyssey has surely not ended. Despite her innate humility,
one of her later poems – written for her partner Imroze – is a
befitting vision of her immortality:
I will meet you again
Where? How? I don’t know
Perhaps as a figure
Of your imagination
I will appear on your canvas
Or perhaps on your canvas
Appearing as a mysterious line
Quietly
I will keep staring at you.
(Translation by Outlook India)
Amrita Pritam is not dead; her dreams of peace, universal love
and triumph of humanism will continue to shape our collective
memories. This is not a time to mourn but to acknowledge that
Amrita has crossed another milestone in her quest for
self-knowledge and love. Au revoir, Amrita!
(This article was published in Friday Times).
