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Amrita Pritam: The grande dame of Punjabi literature
By
ASHOK PATNAIK
 Amrita
Pritam is the goddess of defiance. A rebel and a recalcitrant,
even a revolutionary. Her works, especially the poetry, tempts
the reader to break off the existential contrarieties and contradictions
of life. Yet one is resisted from administering his/her thought-process
to transform the society. Like the mirror, her principal task
was to reflect the society as it subsisted with stink and flavour;
good and bad. In truth, it was her creative talent wrought up
with the twinge of bereavement that came of age during the dark
days of the Partition of Punjab. Small wonder then, that one
of the most beautifully weird poems ever written by Amrita was
the New Heer or Aankhaan Waris Shah Nu… which was addressed
"to the author of the Punjabi romantic epic of immortal
love".
Born on 31 August 1919 in Gujranwala (now
in Pakistan), Amrita Pritam underwent turbulent childhood
days (except the case that Rabindranath Tagore cajoled her
once): She lost her mother when she was 11, and at a later
adolescent stage, her poetry was something which her father
thoroughly despised because of its unconventional tone. What
he anticipated from his exceptionally talented daughter was
religious verse and not the sensuous and spontaneous outpourings
of love. In fact, she often provoked the whole community when
she essayed to transcend her intense sexual impulse into poetic
images of rare beauty. It has been said of her that "her
poetry depicts the feeling of a woman in love. She has loved
dearly and suffered terribly. She loves with her whole being
and considers her personality incomplete unless the man condescends
to transform it into some thing, pure and sublime…"
However, to confine Amrita Pritam to such a limited circumference
is to ignore her other monumental works. The Indian fraternity
gave immediate recognition to her seminal collection of poems
Sunehra (Messages) which was published in 1955.
It was the book made her the first lady recipient of the prestigious
Sahitya Akademi Award in the following year. Couched in sensuous
and spontaneous outpourings on the theme of love, these poems
radiate with "an unearthly glory without losing contact
with the earth". It can be affirmatively said that Sunehra
is indubitably Pritam's finest, in fact, the most sparkling
collection ever written.
In Sunehra, she is totally involved in her personal
anguish and he who has "filled her dreams since adolescence
and being of victim of social and religious convictions, has
failed to reciprocate her love with the intensity and ardor
it demanded …she is eagerly expectant of the day when
her love will be reciprocated and thus mellowed". As
the best and finest are always untranslatable, so is Sunehra,
failed to reach a wider audience, particularly in other languages.
Yet after the legendary poet Sitakanta Mohapatra, it is Amrita
Pritam's works which have been translated in English, Albanian,
Bulgarian, French, Polish, Russian, Spanish and all the 21
Indian languages.
Equally astounding is her rich literary corpus --she had published
75 books -of which there are 28 novels, 18 volumes of verse,
five short stories and 16 miscellaneous prose. Besides, she
also edited Punjabi literary journal "Nagmani".
Two of her novels Dharti Sagar te Sippiyan (1965) and
Unah Di Kahani (1976) have been made into her films entitled
"Kadambari" and "Daaku"
for which she even composed songs.
It is quite often alleged of Pritam that she has no real sense
of history; nor is she a philosophical poet interested in
the dynamic of ideas" but these charges stand no when
her works are read in a form they were written. The 1947 Partition
made Punjabi poets more self conscious of their social responsibilities.
If Punjabi litterateur Mohan Singh celebrated the glory of
Taj Mahal, he also depicted the untold sufferings of the thousand
labourers who toiled for twenty long years to fulfill the
dream of Shah Jahan. So was Pritam's, who painted an intensely
grim but honest account of the distorted social assemblage
where women and peasants were ruthlessly exploited. As KS
Duggal observes: "She (Pritam) started writing as a sissy.
But it was a heart of a mother in her that shed tears of blood
immediately after the Partition at in insensate massacre of
innocent men and women on both sides of the border."
Deeply influenced by Baudelaire (Ode to Beauty), Mayakovsky,
Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gothe, Schiller, Freud and Tagore, Pritam's
works deal with the axiomatic problems of life, wants and
denials of common men and women. In these, she extensively
brought to bear parable to delineate her feelings. Her other
acclaimed poems like Kasturi (Music) and Nagamani
(Serpent's Jewel) published in 1959 and 1964 respectively
illustrate her "strivings for her possibilities of life".
In Chak Nambar Chatti (Village Number Thirty Six) published
in1964, one finds a completely matured Pritam addressing serious
issues. Victorian minded readers were taken aback when candidly
discussed sex of a girl who wants to play a double role --prostitute
and wife, just because she passionately loves him. A conspicuous
message, which emerges from the novel, is that obscenity is
less earthy because the protagonist is concerned with moral
and ethical standards.
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