In a magazine interview in 1990, Amrita Pritam refereed her standing among her readers. “In Punjabi, I’m known and loved as a poet. My Hindi readers, however, know me by my novels; they are probably unaware that I also write poetry.”

 It is indeed true that her Hindi poetry attracts lesser loving attention than her Punjabi poetry which is loved and adored, in Punjabi, and in several languages of translation – minutiae of everyday life, evanescent impressions loaded in permanent literary memory.

 Ajj Aakhan Waris Shah nu, the long poem she composed in Punjabi in the immediate aftermath of Partition, remains her immortal legacy. Political leaders rejoiced in their political solution. For the ordinary people, however, even as their fields and forests, and the skies above remained the same, they altered irrevocably. Amrita immortalized that profoundly schizophrenic experience in her soulful and deeply moving elegy to Waris Shah.

 The nazms she later wrote in Hindi, however, get overshadowed by her Hindi prose.

 This night of mine 

Amrita was born on 31 August, 1919 in Gujranwala, Punjab, now in Pakistan, to a hermit-like father who was himself a poet and a mother who taught in a nearby school.

 Of her birth, she wryly observed, in an interview on a radio show on Jalandhar Akashvani, “The birth of a person is a curious anomaly of life. Even though his birth involves the person in the fullest possible sense, yet he is the only one completely unaware of the circumstance of his birth – where and when he was born, what season it was, what time of day. My nani (maternal grandmother) tells me when I was born - during the pitter-patter of rains: ‘15 bhadon, when the gods were asleep. And the year was when the Jalianwala Bagh massacre had happened.’ ”

It was a lonely childhood by all accounts, after she lost her mother at eleven. Her experience of the abrupt withdrawal of maternal sanctuary, through her teenage years, was what framed her literary passage in large measure.

Even so, for a while, her extraordinarily intuitive child’s mind remained ensnared in her father’s mode of thought. Their home had a room full of tomes, that stood lost in contemplation, or so it seemed to her. The room that contained these book-hermits, was, by her father’s injunction, to be treated like a temple and she was supposed to go in with covered head and bare feet.

One day, her father found her in that room with her head uncovered. It was sacrilege and the little girl was severely admonished. While she was being scolded, Amrita remembers the anger that raged through her like a fire. Suddenly, the anger erupted. She silenced her father with an impassioned and wildly presumptive assertion, as it seemed then: “I can write books like these. I have written such a tome in an earlier life. I have seen it in my dream.”

Dreams and the substance of her dreams formed a powerful dimension of her creative process. Dreams, nighttime staging of subconscious thought and intuition, were a trusted force that guided her pen. In her memoir, Rasidi Ticket, she talks about her dreams, their variety, clarity, and how almost always, they seemed like messages life wanted to give her.

Her father, though emotionally distant, still taught her the essential tools of her craft – the art of poetic meter and rhyme, kafiya and radif, that are the very soul of Urdu poetic creation. He remained an abiding influence all through her life.

Her first collection of verses, Amrit Lehren, was published in 1935, when she was barely sixteen. It created a stir, and brought a foretaste of what would become an almost regular feature of her life as a writer – controversy. A few believed that the verses had been penned by her father and published under her name.

Controversy also courted her magnum opus Ajj Ankhan Waris Shah nu, with its visceral images, when it received criticism from various cross-sections of the literary establishment. Much later in 1983, a poem on Guru Nanak again brought her up against puritanical old-timers who frowned upon her creative portrayal.

During her growing-up years, Amrita’s writings had two faces. There was the face that had the blessing of her father – poetry that was ‘right’ for a young girl to own. The other face remained mostly in shadow – it showed itself when the moon shone down on her terrace and enticed youthful outpourings from her on scraps of paper that she later tore up, perhaps beset by guilt and fear.

As a public figure in her later years, she looked back upon her life, and saw her literary experiences as an ongoing journey, keeping time with her evolving personhood. She believed that the culmination of an individual’s quest was universal consciousness, and that rewards and recognitions were obstacles in the path to ultimate self-realization. She believed that a conscionable writer devoted their entire self to serving their art, and looked upon rewards with a certain cultivated detachment.

 She became part of the Progressive Writers Movement, and in the nineteen sixties, began to focus on women and society. Her works took on a clearly feminist stance as she contemplated the position of women in relationships – with family, men and god himself.  At no time, however, did her writing project the woman as a gender victim. At no time did her writing lose its raw look, almost as if the words could walk out of poems and sit there before you, forcing you to consider questions they were not afraid to ask.

 She was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1956 for her Punjabi work, Sunehre, and the Jnanpith Award in 1982.

 Finding myself

Amrita Pritam is, in a sense, Emerson’s poet ‘who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole,—reattaching even artificial things and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight’.  So too, Pritam views living and its vagaries as falling ‘within the great Order not less than the bee-hive, or the spider’s geometrical web’.

Her poetry is moody, with a shimmering quality, like bitter-sweet memories that remind us of our wayfaring destinies, our shadowy destinations. Her lexicon is the common man’s everyday language, as often as it is chaste Urdu phrases that surround and overwhelm the senses with cascading images. It is the poet’s genius that informs the choice of vocabulary and style – there are no patterns here. Her poems are exquisite surprise packages – unlocking the gems they conceal is an act of grace, or love.

One of the fascinating things in her poems is the colloquialisms and word arrangements. It is in the manner of spoken communication – words animated in a ‘thinking in real-time’ verbal sequence, rather than formalized structures. By dressing up the thought in unadorned and simple attire, it comes to belong to every one – honest to life, magnetic.

It is said she wrote her nazms spontaneously, and only rarely did she edit them beyond the absolutely essential, and sometimes not at all. Her poetry, however, is resounding proof that this was no fleeting impulse – it was her singular process of channeling her core into her art.

She arose from the syncretic, highly poeticized and mellowed tradition of contemporary Urdu poetry. It was dense with imagery and richly imaginative metaphors, as well as the modernizing influences of nineteenth century progressive writers and poets. Her inspirations - Sufi poetry of Sultan Bahu and Bulle Shah and mystical poetry of the fourteenth century Persian poet and mystic, Hafiz Shirazi. Amrita probably imbibed them through the very air she breathed as a child, and so, her creations had an unmistakably Sufi-spiritualized soul

Other influences she mentions in her interviews are Swami Vivekanand and Osho Rajneesh. Also too, Ayn Rand’s philosophy of rational individualism guided the evolution and assertion of her own identity. In an edition of Nagmani, she states, “I will name two philosophers in the same breath – Ayn Rand and Vivekanand. Ayn Rand is the seed of individualism [in me] – Vivekanand  developed and grew that individualism seed to merge with universal consciousness.”

There were others that left an impression on her, like Jawaharlal Nehru and the-then Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh. They were, in turn, impressed by her.

“The personalities of Nehru and Ho Chi Minh inspired me. I have often mentioned how Nehru’s frankness was disarming and was more than just a public or political face; it emanated from within, and that was its beauty. I struck a chord with Ho Chi Minh too, and we discussed a dimension of politics which had the potential to change the world.”

Her poetry was also, in part, a function of her time and the preponderant code of conduct for a woman. Later in life, she was candid in acknowledging all of these pieces that added up to create the Amrita Pritam readers came to love or hate – she could never be ignored. And throughout her life, these pieces kept shifting their place and proportion, and her work mirrored those shifts.

Then there were the vicissitudes of her own life. We have to remember that the era was one of profound strife in this part of the world, in her world. The partition occurred as she was preparing to be a mother for the first time. To watch life sunder, over and over again, all around as far as the eye went, to raise two children and set up a new home and life – must all leave behind a residue. She had her emotional ebbs, and sought out psychiatric help. In her conversations in later life, she admitted to the presence of shadows in her life that left her troubled. She admitted that she was not willing to discuss those with the same openness she brought to other areas of her life. There are nazms, though, that betray her irrevocable sadnesses.

All of these came together to cultivate her artistic attitude, as is discernible in her poetry-mirror, almost consistently.

This is my translation of her poem, "Chup ki saazish".

Conspiracy of silence                         

The night yawns...

Somebody stakes out a soft heart –

More dangerous than any other is the

theft of people’s dreams

Signs of the burglary are

chalked on every street

of every city in every country.

But no eye sees it –

nor is startled by it

Only like a dog in chains,

a nazm of some poet

protests impotently

every now and again.