LITERATURE
Amrita Pritam
THE DOYEN OF INDIAN LITERARY SCENE
Dr. Ashok K. Choudhury
Barely six days after the death of Nirmal Verma,
the pioneer of Nayee Kahani form in Hindi literature the world of literature
lost the octogenarian litterateur Amrita Pritam on October 31 2005. Her creative
talent, wrought up with her peaking anguish, came of age during the dark days of
the partition of Punjab and the period immediately after Independence, marred by
the partition. The traumatic events and thereafter, a new corpus of literature
grew out of the tremendous impact of the partition in several Indian languages
specially in Urdu, Hindi, and Punjabi, but mostly in the languages directly
affected by it. The writers, responding to the challenge of the massacre, and
suffering and degradation of all human values, took up their pens to revolt the
tide of blood and hatred, and to uphold the banner of humanity and peace. Among
these works that come out of the partition riot, well known are - Tamas, perhaps
the most powerful novel ever written on the subject, by Bhisham Sahni; Khuswant
Singh's Train to Pakistan, written nearly a decade after the holocaust that
followed the partition; Aag de Khed (The Play of Fire) by Nanak Singh, written
soon after the partition when wounds of the monstrosities were still raw; Saadat
Manto's Urdu stories on that black era of Indian history; and Ajj Aakhan Waris
Shah Nu (I say to Warish Shah) by Amrita Pritam which recounts the tale of
inhumanity, horror and hate.
Soon after the ordeal, anguished Amrita wounded in mind and displaced from her
homeland Lahore, penned the following rebellious lines in Punjabi, her mother
tongue :
" Ajj aakhan Waris Shah nu,
Tu Kabra wichon bol…
Te aj kitabe ish da koi agla warkha phol…
Warish Shah nu kehan…"
(I say, today, to Waris Shah,
rise and speak from your grave
when a daughter of the fabled Punjab wept
he gave a tongue to her silent grief
today a million daughters weep
but where is Warish Shah to give voice to their woes ?)
"The values of life have altogether changed since the time of partition. The
social perceptions, themes and the fabric of the society have taken a different
role altogether," says Amrita Pritam. Ajj Akhan Waris Shah Nu (I say to Warish
Shah) or New Heer, a heart rendering poem is addressed to Warish Shah, the
celebrated 18th century Punjabi humanistic-romantic poet and author of the
Heer-Ranjha, depicting the love-tale of the legendary pair which is an essential
part of Punjabi culture and psyche. Those days you needed all the luck for the
train to take you to your destination without bloodshed or rape at the
intermediate station. Amrita says, that night was dark. She was all alone in an
over-crowded compartment full of homeless people who had walked through the
shadow of death. The muslims massacring the Hindus and the Hindus hungry for
Muslim heads. It was like all decency, all good - neighbourliness sinking around
her. Suddenly she found her lips moving, tears gushing in her eyes, she invoked
Warish Shah. Regarded as an 'immortal poem', Ajj Akhan… became almost a legend
and was sung with great pathos all over Punjabi-speaking areas on the either
side of the newly-created border.
Amrita Pritam's extreme anger against the distorted social assemblage where
common people, primarily women, had to suffer in the name of religion is often
seen in her works. For the first time, female psyche and female perceptions
found a creative exposure in her works. She usually weaves her stories around
romance and love as seen or depicted in the medieval Kissakav (long poem
narrating a story), where interest of society and the individual came into a
direct clash. She writes of the violated woman, of love, of the Punjab, of
mankind at large. But in effect, and through these easily discernible themes,
Amrita writes of her own aches and joys, self-divisions and tensions, negations
and affirmations. Her narratives are an inter-mignling of rebellion and
revolutions.
Her Kagaz te Canvas (The Paper and the Canvas), the first Punjabi book published
in 1970 which won the country's highest and most prestigious Bharatiya Jnanpeeth
Award in 1981, is the woman's lyrical cry against her existential fate and
societal abuse which breaks out in poems of rare charm and vitality.
With western influence, she lauds the liberalization of women, especially in
their free relationship with men. In her poem, she is all praise for the deeds
and views of Marilyn Manroe and Ayn Rand.
Amrita Pritam is the first women recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award, which
she won for Sunehurey (Message, 1955) in 1956. Sunehurey, overflows with some of
the finest poems she ever wrote, a long lovable lyric, is the result of her
friendship with the Urdu poet and lyricist, Sahir Ludhianvi, and her individual
agony.
Couched in sensuous and spontaneous outpouring on the theme of love these poems
radiate with 'an unearthly glory without losing contact with the earth.'
Sunehurey, marked for freshness of idioms and impassioned eloquence, won her
national and international renown.
Inspired by her father she inherited the rebel spirit and the love of language
that has marked her life, Amrita Pritam started writing as a sissy. She writes,
'my mother never failed in the slightest degree to honour and obey my father's
male will… (but) collected all the anger from her mind and poured it into my
infant being.' She has always been closer to her mother than her father, but
lost her mother when she was eleven, and with the encouragement of her father,
Amrita managed to cope with her loss by writing poetry. Published under her
parental name Amrita Cour, she began to write poem and her first collection
Thandian Kiran (Cool Rays, 1935) appeared when she was 16, followed by very
juvenile verses entitled Amrita Lehran (Waves of Nectar, 1936).
Homiletic in theme and tone, revealing conformist ethics and traditional
metrics, her next few collections - Jeeunda Jiwan (Living Life, 1939), Trel
Dhote Phund (Dew-washed Flowers, 1941), O Geetan Valia (Makers of Songs, 1942),
Badlan De Palle Wich (In the Lap of Clouds, 1943), Sanjh di Lali (Twilight,
1943), Niki Jehi Sugat (A Small Gift, 1944), Lok Peed (The People's Anguish
1944) - became more modern in tone and construction, reflecting what has been
called romantic progression. These volumes depict the feelings of a woman in
love.
Reacting to the marxist-realist criticism, she attended her sensibility in a
radical manner and her romantic sentiment changed to a rather feminist and
mordant irony over woman's lot in her world and adopted quite a strident tone
about man's treatment of woman. Nevertheless its humanist appeal got subsumed
into her feminist politics and poetics during this period.
Her poetry of this mood is published in Main Twarikh Han Hind Di (I am India's
History, 1949) and Sarghi Wela (The Hour of Dawn, 1951). In her subsequent
volumes Sunehurey (The Message, 1955), Ashok Cheti(1957), Kasturi (The Musk,
1959), Nagmani (The Snake Stone, 1964), Kagaz te Kanvas, it is the woman's lyric
cry against her existential fate and societal abuse. Kasturi and Nagmani, posit
her strivings 'the higher possibilities of life', written during and soon after
the crisis period in her life, suffused with a height ended sense of existential
ecstasies and agonies, capture 'grace under pressure' and fortitude in the midst
of suffering and loss.Her poetry, however depicts the feelings of woman in love.
She has loved dearly, and suffered terribly.
Pinjar (Skeleton), one of the most powerful novel of her taken over by Bollywood
for a film by Chandraprakash Dwivedi , the tale of the partition, with a
difference, is the story of Pooro, who is abducted by a muslim boy, Rusheed. Her
parents refuse to recover Pooro from Rusheed as a defiled woman. One night she
runs away from Rusheed's house and comes back home. Pooro's father and mother
too, refuse to accept her back, 'you have lived with a Muslim boy for 15 days,
we can not accept you back. How shall we face the village, the society? Go back
to the place from where you have come?' And Pooro goes back to Rusheed and
obliged to live with him and bears him a son. Through Pinjar Amrita Pritam is
trying to say that - "I tried to look at the victimization of women, even if in
the name of religion. At times, it becomes too horrific for me to relive those
memories of 1947. My aim was to echo what I saw and its significance."
Kore Kagaz (Blank Papers), Amrita Pritam's another important work is about the
restlessness of a young man in search of his identity, origins and wants to know
about his parents and himself. When he comes to know the truth, his heart bleeds
for his mother who was betrayed by his father and was forced to commit suicide
by drawning herself in the Ganga. The characters of her novel pass a life of
suffering and ultimately die. They seek a union with their lovers in the next
world as the world would not and cannot stand to it.
Though Amrita Pritam essentially a poet even when writing fiction, has been a
persistent storywriter right from 1940 onwards. Her story has an unmistakably
poetic and lyrical quality about it, which has made it so endearing not only to
her Punjabi readers but also to her Hindi readers too. Her stories, as intense
as they are prolific, remain a class apart. Jangli Bute (The Wild Plants),
Chandrida Haunka (The Sigh of the Moonshine), Akhir Khat (The Last Letter),
Gojar Dian Parian (The Fairies of Gojar) and Ajnabi (The Stranger) are some of
her story collections, with her favourite theme female liberation in Indian
settings. However, many of her stories are characterized by unusual depth, power
and artistry, especially like Ik Shehar De Maut, Teesari Aurat, Panj Vareh Lambi
Sarak. For their precision and prunning, these stories are like those
resourceful hostesses who triumphantly succeed in giving a large dance in a
small gloom.
In her seven decades of her literary career Amrita has written more than 120
books in different geners -- poetry, novel, prose, short stories, and
autobiography. Besides, she has written about two dozen entertaining books for
children on fictional talent. The range of her literary output is quite
extensive.
Branded as a pagan for Amrita Pritam's candid views on religion and
fundamentalism, hated for her outrageous honesty, her life has been an open
book, beautiful in its truthfullness. The men she loved, the dreams she dreamed,
the desire that burn within her can be gleaned from her autobiographical works
Rasidi Ticket (Revenue Stamp, 1976) and the more recent Life and Times of Amrita
Pritam. Her Rasidi Ticket is a trend setting book so far as the boldness and
frankness of feelings are concerned. In the autobiography, she speaks of her
writing 'as an illegitimate child' born out of the forbidden consummation' of an
affair between the reality of my life and the dream of my heart. However, she
insists that my writing is personal but not about myself.
Apart from Pinjar, numerous films are produced based on her novel - Kadambari,
Dharti Sagar Te Sipian, Daaku, a feature film based on her novel Unah Di Kahaani,
Jangali Booti, Zindagi, Rishta, Karamawali. -CNF