I met Amrita Pritamji, the iconic Indian writer first
time in 1999 at her residence in Delhi along with veteran Punjabi Fiction
writer Gurbachan Singh Bhullar for obtaining her permission to translate her works
into Bengali. And to my utter surprise, the mighty lady, whose works as well as
life, were a bold statement that redefined not just the Punjabi literary canon
but also found new words and images for how Indian women perceived themselves,
have permitted me without any hesitation and blessed me with a kiss on my
forehead.
Shyamal Bhattacharya
We
found her in a good mood and she was quite humorous. She mentioned the famous
writer and journalist Khushwant Singh once telling Amritaji that the whole
story of her life was so inconsequential and brief that it could be easily contained
within the small space at the back of a revenue stamp. She remembered the joke
and called her autobiography Raseedi Ticket (The Revenue Stamp). This one
incident probably sums up this prolific and ground-breaking writer’s philosophy
of life – “My work/my life will be my answer”.
Before
meeting her, I had gone through about her life and works. She was the only
child of Kartar Singh and Raj Kaur, a Sikh couple who named her Amrita Kaur in
1919, in Gujranwala, Punjab in erstwhile undivided British India, now Pakistan.
Her father was a school teacher by profession but is also believed to have been
a small-time poet. The environment in her early home was deeply spiritual; her
father was a Sikh religious pracharak (preacher) as well. Along with religious
learning, she also inherited her love for literature from him.
Amrita
was born a rebel, a questioner of norms, and a devil’s advocate of sorts. She
asked difficult questions and challenged those things that everyone accepted as
the norm. This gets reflected in her literature and personal life much later
and throughout. Amrita became the first Punjabi woman writer to move out of the
shadows of the contemporary male writers and created her own niche in Punjabi
literature. Not just a poet, she was indeed revolution personified.
In
her autobiography, she recalls that once as a young girl she noticed water
being hawked at the railway platform as Hindu water and Muslim water. She
questioned her mother — “Is water also Hindu-Mussalman?” Her mother’s reply –
“It is this way here…” – was definitely not satisfactory for the young rebel. Later,
a very young Amrita raised her voice against her conventional grandmother, who
kept separate utensils for her Muslim visitors. It was “….my first baghavat
(rebellion) against religion“, she writes therein.
Amrita,
the young critical thinker who was already questioning a lot of morality and
religion, turned almost atheist after the death of her mother when she was
barely eleven years old. She realised the uselessness of prayer as all her
prayers to restore her mother’s health had turned futile and stopped praying
altogether after her mother passed away.
The
family then moved to Lahore where the young teenager found herself overburdened
with responsibilities of running a household. In such depressing and
challenging circumstances, Amrita found succour in writing. Her exceptional
talent did not go unnoticed and as a result her first anthology of poems ‘Amrit
Lehran’ (Immortal Waves) was published in 1936 when she was barely 16 years
old.
Trying
to find some grip on life the young Amrita married Pritam Singh and became
Amrita Pritam around the same time, a name she carried all her life. Pritam was
the son of a hosiery merchant and an Editor, the couple had two children, but
according to Amrita the union was loveless and devoid of any passion or deep
emotion. I read details about her while translating the Autobiography of Kartar
Singh Duggal as well. I was attracted, reading about her madness and compassion
towards literature. Famous Punjabi Poet Mohan Singh was in deep and abiding
infatuation for Amrita after the sudden demise of his wife Basant. But Amrita
chose to marry Pritam Singh.
Not
many days later there was an evening party at a friend’s place where Amrita
came with her husband. Finding his love in the company of her husband Mohan
Singh depicted what he underwent in a poem entitled Jaidad (Property)
At
the door stood she – a piece of property;
Beside
her stood the owner, her husband,
And
in front, the lover.
At
the door stood she,
Silent
and still,
Like
a lily-white marble pillar,
Her
breasts were like two caged doves,
Her
eyes like two bits of luminous stone,
Her
lips like two rubies,
Silent
and helpless,
Ended
was her speech and her smile,
Woe
to this benighting shadow of convention
Woe
to this bloodthirsty ogre of custom.
Beside
her
Stood
the husband
Placing
his hand upon her shoulder,
He
said:
This
is my property;
I
am the master,
Manu's
law favours me;
So
does man's;
So
does my rank;
The
religion,
And
the custom.
The
heart?
That
matters not.
I
shall see
How
this handsome edifice
Can
refuse to give me shelter, Or deny me warmth in winter
And
cool in summer.
In
front, the lover,
Resolute
in thought:
A
piece of property
Yes,
She is
A
silent rock,
Which
the fire of my love,
Cannot
melt today,
I
shall further inflame this fire.
Changing
this world,
I
shall return some day,
I
shall recall her to life.
(Translation:
Harbhans Singh]
It
remains one of the most outstanding pieces of Mohan Singh's poetry of the
period.
That
it had become a scandal, Amrita Pritam didn’t care. In fact she seemed to enjoy
it. Despite what talked about, she continued to meet Mohan Singh, visited him
with or without her husband. Her husband, the last gentleman on earth, didn't
pay heed to what people said. He was loyal to his wife; he had no reason to
doubt her integrity.
In
the world of Punjabi letters that was dominated by men, Amrita wished to carve
her way. Her evolution was so unique that people associated her name with Mohan
Singh bothered her not, for was Mohan Singh not the premier Punjabi poet of the
day? She came visiting Mohan Singh, the editor of a leading Punjabi journal as
an upcoming poetess. She figured in the ‘Panj Darya’ prominently. Her husband
trusted her. They purchased a tanga (horse-driven carriage)so that she was
mobile and on her own.
Amrita
continued writing poetry so prolifically; in spite of the dissatisfactory
marriage, as she mentioned in her autobiography, she had already gained much acclaim
and by 1943 had six anthologies of poetry to her credit. Her initial work
consisted mainly of romantic poems though she gradually gravitated towards the
Progressive Writers’ Movement – a literary movement where writers were writing
about socio-economic concerns of their society and times.
In
1944, in a poetry collection titled ‘Lok Peed’ (Anguish of the Public) Amrita’s
first social poetry emerged and she criticised the economy being depleted by
the Second World War and the disastrous Bengal famine of 1943. Her increased
involvement in social work in the mid-1940s, her working with the Lahore Radio
Station, when Kataar Singh Duggal was working there as a Programmer, for a
brief period and her angst at the helplessness of the commoners especially
women made her works around that time become more and more rebellious and
socio-political in nature.
The
partition of the country in 1947 became a watershed for Amrita- both as an
individual and as a writer. She witnessed innumerable, unspeakable human
tragedies. The communal riots that continued for several months during the
refugee influx to and fro both sides led to such mindless violence that like
most other survivors of this historic tragedy, it left an indelible mark on her
mind.
Amrita,
a young woman of 28 moved to New Delhi from Lahore. By now she was sure that
her marriage was just imprisoning her body and soul. It was in this state of
emotional turbulence that she penned one of her oft-quoted and most famous
poems ‘Ajj Akhaan Waris Shah Nu’ (‘Today I invoke Waris Shah’) in 1948,
invoking the famous Sufi poet Waris Shah.
In
this poem she challenges the tropes used in romantic poetry – not just Punjabi
or Sufi poetry, but the entire literary canon – where the woman is just seen as
a consort/beloved and nothing more, her suffering and her dilemmas completely
overlooked. Also, her vision of love here became significantly broadened and
delved into the other worldly Sufi realms.
Nirupama
Dutt, a prominent Punjabi/English writer herself, who was a friend and confidante
of Amrita in her last years and has translated some of her work, writes in an
article that in Amrita’s literature love wasn’t viewed as ‘a narrow man-woman
exchange’. She was deeply hurt and saddened by the loss of a composite Punjabi
culture and felt a deep sense of betrayal like many other survivors because of
the mindless bloodshed during and in the aftermath of the Partition. Nirupama
says that probably she had turned to Waris Shah to express this deep-seated
anguish because he had composed one of the most famous and immortal love
legends of Punjab.
“AjakhaanWaris
Shah nu
Kitonqabranwichonbol,
Teajjkitab-e-ishq
da koi
Aglavarkaphol”
(I
call out to Waris Shah today
To
speak out from his grave
And
turn today the next leaf
Of
the book of love.)
(Original
Amrita Pritam, Translation: NirupamaDutt)
Her
novella ‘Pinjar’ (Skeleton/Cage) came out in 1952. This was made into a
Bollywood film years later in 2002 and remains till date one of the few Punjabi
works on the partition of India from a woman’s perspective.
Amrita
is mostly known for her passionate and unabashed love poems, hitherto unknown
in the whole canon of Indian literature by women. She talks about the woman’s
body as an independent entity as well as a contested space by a man’s love and
the tradition’s pressure to procreate.
These
revolutionary ideas and expressions made some contemporary critics describe her
as a feminist much before feminism. She was a firebrand poet who would not mind
any words just because of expectations from her gender.
Amrita
began working in the Punjabi service of All India Radio, Delhi and continued
serving there till 1961. In the 1960s, post-Pinjar, the feminist streak in her
writings became more predominant and vociferous. But her feminism was not
self-centered, it was more an expression of marginal women. In Pinjar, Amrita
depicted the immense human tragedy through the lives of young Muslim, Sikh and
Hindu women who were abducted, raped and killed. Several of these women were
permanently separated from their families and those that were reconciled were
not accepted and labelled ‘tainted’. Many of her poignant poems during this
period also encapsulate the silent suffering of women in such a conservative
milieu where behind their suffocating veils these women remained perpetually
doomed and belonged nowhere. This is the reason I have decided to translate her
into Bengali. Several of her later works – ‘KaalChetna’ (‘Consciousness of
Time’), ‘Kala Gulab’ (‘Black Rose’), and ‘Aksharon Kay Saye’ (‘Shadows of
Words’) all had a strong rebellious undertone.
Her
writings on the partition move away from the gory violence and explore its
impact on everyday lives and the association between memory and trauma in a
post-partition world, especially in the lives of the womenfolk. From Angoori to
Veero – the ‘ideal’ form of womanhood in nationalist literature was eroded with
every protagonist in her work.love and desire in Amrita Pritam’s work was never
seen through just rose-tinted glasses. In her poem, ‘Virgin’, she wrote:
“To
fulfill our union
I
had to kill the virgin.
And
kill her, I did.
Such
murders are sanctioned by the law
Only
the humiliation accompanying them is illegal.
So
I drank the poison of humiliation.”
For
me this is a sharp critique of marital rape and the complicity of the law in
it. Who kills the virgin and for what purposes? But the way the poem ends, it
raises another question: Who truly is the virgin?
“But
when I saw myself in my mirror,
there
she was before me;
The
same one I thought I had
murdered
during the night.
Oh,
God!
Was
the bridal chamber so dark that I could not tell
the
one I had slain
from
the one I did, in fact, kill.”
Amrita
survived and walked out of a loveless marriage, as mentioned earlier, she bore
with courage the agony of being uprooted from her homeland during partition and
went on to lead an exemplary life.
Amrita’s
life choices, as well as her literature, were definitely ahead of her times.
She gathered the courage to walk out of her loveless arranged marriage, which
was unheard of in those times, and openly acknowledged her love for the famous
poet Sahir Ludhianavi. She lived the rest of her life with her companion Imroz,
the artist from Pakistan who migrated to India only because of her. Her
relationship with Imroz resulted in some of her most beautiful poems and has
served as an example to look up to for women who dare to be themselves in a
world that is constantly trying to put them into watertight compartments –
daughter, wife, mother or the more intangible ones – chastity, morality,
virtue. I read her letters to Imroz and Sahir Ludhianvi that explore
unrestricted desire, love and passion paved the path for many women in love.
She wrote in the poem ‘First Book’:
“That
was our tryst, yours and mine.
We
slept on a bed of stones,
and
our eyes, lips and fingertips,
became
the words of your body and mine,
they
then made a translation of this first book.
The
Rig Veda was compiled much later.”
Here
is a profound intermingling of the sacred with the secular.
The
hetero-normativity of the institution of marriage and the chains it binds us in
was critiqued by Amrita in her poems ‘Night’ and ‘The Scar’ questioned the
norms of our society – motherhood, pregnancy, marriage, and the inherent
gendered violence within hetero-normative relationships. Almost like Simone De
Beauvoir, Amrita Pritam lived her principles choosing to break off an unhappy
marriage and remained unmarried thereafter. This choice of being together
outside wedlock in 1958, when living together was not even heard of, became one
of the most defining statements about her non-conformity to the norms of ‘ideal
Indian womanhood’. This courage allowed her to transcend all social sanctions
and the formal legitimacy of marriage.
While
discussing about the difference between the written works of men and women in
the 20th century and the sexual politics in the publishing world she wrote, “As
for women, I feel that women in literature are different from women in other
fields… Basically, there is a prejudice against women in literature. Men take
women’s writing lightly; they doubt a woman’s sincerity. For example, when I
got this SahityaAkademi Award, and with it fame, the leading English daily in
Delhi wrote that I got my popularity in Punjabi literature because of my youth
and beauty. I felt very sorry to read that. Why not talent? They can admire a
beautiful woman, but not a talented one.”
In
1964, she founded a Punjabi literary journal called Naagmaс╣Зi, (Serpent’s
Jewel), the monthly publication in which she started showcasing the work of
emerging and reputed Punjabi poets and writers as well as translations of
foreign writers, as her contribution to a growing new canon of new literatures
in India. The mere fact that Amrita Pritam would choose a name which has the
word Serpent – a dubious animal in most mythology – is perhaps representative
of her desire to challenge the society and its ideas.
Amrita’s
literary legacy is vast not just in its impact but its volume too, consisting
of more than a hundred books of poetry, fiction, biographies, essays, and even a
collection of Punjabi folk songs – many of which were translated into several
Indian and foreign languages as her fame and reputation grew.
In
1956 Amrita’s work ‘Sunehey’ (‘Messages’) was conferred the reputed Sahitya Akademi
Award. Later she was also awarded one of India’s highest literary awards – the
Bhartiya Jnanpith Award for ‘KagajTe Canvas’ (‘Paper and Canvas’). She was also
the recipient of the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second-highest civilian award and
was elected a member of the RajyaSabha.
Amrita
Pritam’s legacy for women and subsequent generations is to intentionally
challenge status quo, trying to use art to challenge accepted taboos and
redefine them. Be fearless, unabashed and courageous in the face of crude
censorship and charges of obscenity, of raising and using your voice to speak
as you see the world – not in the manner that the world expects you to speak.
The
last of Amrita’s love poems titled Main Tenu Pher Milangi (‘I shall meet you
again’), is now not just a piece of poetry but a legend in its own right,
having been recited by many including the famous writer Gulzar. This poem is
dedicated to her long-time companion Imroz and is now seen as her perfect
epilogue. It showcases her unique perspective on life, her vision of love and
the world and her undying hope for a world full of love and peace.
I
will meet you yet again
How
and where
I
do not know
Perhaps
I will become a
figment
of your imagination
or
maybe splaying myself
as
a mysterious line
on
your canvas
I
will keep gazing at you.
Perhaps
I will become a ray
of
sunshine and
dissolve
in your colours
or
embraced by your colours
I
will paint myself on your canvas
I
do not how and where –
But
I will meet you for sure.
Maybe
I will transform into a spring
and
rub foaming
droplets
of water on your body
and
like a coolness I will
ease
into your chest
I
know nothing
but
that whatever time might do
this
birth shall run along with me.
When
the body perishes
It
all perishes
but
the strings of memory
are
woven of cosmic atoms
I
will pick these particles
Re-weave
the strings
and
I will meet you yet again.
—
Translated from original Punjabi “Main Tenu Phir Milangi” by Pooja Sharma Rao.
Bionote: Shyamal Bhattacharya is presently working with Press Information bureau as Translator to Prime Minister of India. He is an eminent author of Bengali Literature and a linguist of repute. His early translations include the poetry of Jugal Parihar from Rajasthani into Bengali, short stories of Amrita Pritam, Kartar Singh Duggal, Ajeet Caur, Omprakash Gaso, Ramsarup Anakhi and 42 others from Punjabi into Bengali and short stories of Ved Rahi from Dogri into Bengali. Some of his important indigenous works include novels like Bukhari and Lodravar Kachakachi; short story collections like Chilte Daag, Fulmotir Basantkal, Jamichalang, Aakashe Orar Galpo, Bharong Pakhir Naach etc. Recipient of honours by Jahangirnagar University, Ganobiswabidyalaya and Dhaka University of Bangladesh(2016) Punjabi Lekhak Akademi, Jallandhar, (2000); Punjabi Sahitya Sabha, Sangrur, (2000); Triveni Sahitya Akademi, Jallandar (2000); Viswakarma Literary Society, (2000); Tripura Prabha Honour (2007), Sutapa Roy Chowdhuri Award by Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi, Govt. of West Bengal (2010), Amrita Pritam Samman (2015), Siromani Sahityakar Samman, Udaipur, Rajasthan ( 2016), Tathagata Srijan Samman, Siddharthanagar, U.P. ( 2016), Mahatma Fule Talent Search Academy, Nagpur( 2016), Sahitya Akademi,Govt. of Madhya Pradesh ( 2018), Manohar Kothari Smriti Samman,by Sahitya Mondal, Shreenathdwara, Rajasthan ( 2019) and the Sahitya Akademi Translation Award (2010). He represented country at Beijing International Book fair in 2010 and attended Brahmaputra Literary Festival (2018).
Thank you Setu. Thanks to Dr. Nabanita Sengupta
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