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, Amrita Pritam had a distorted childhood (except the case that Rabindranath Tagore cajoled her once)--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.
Infact, 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 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 thee 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. Balwant Gargi, a long time friend of Pritam, perceptively notes: "She feels that where values end, obscenity begins."
Pritam's short stories, as intense as they are prolific, remain a class apart. Unusual depth, power and artistry characterize many of them, especially Ik Shehar De Maut, Tessari Aurat and Panj Vareh Lambi Sarak. For their precise and pruning, these stories are like those resourceful hostesses who triumphantly succeed in giving a large dance in a small room.
Her autobiography Rashidi Tickat (The Revenue Stamp) first published in Punjabi in (1976) is an honest chronicle written with a warmth and truthfulness. By all means, it may not equal with Nirad C. Chaudhuri's classic The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian or RK Narayan's My Days, but it has all the ingredients to take a place next to Dom Moreas' My Son's Father, which Stephen Spender aptly described as a minor classic.
Unfortunately, this too is not bereft of controversy. At one time, its fate was about to be hermetically sealed --but that somehow could not be materialized. On the following year, it appeared in both the Hindi and English versions.
Retrospectively, when Pritam in the course of a conversation with Khushwant Singh disclosed her plans to write an autobiography, the latter unwittingly remarked: "What is there to your life? Just an incident or two… you could use the back of a revenue stamp to write it."
In a brief prologue to The Revenue Stamp, Pritam shot back, "Whatever happened in my life happened between the layers of thought that found their way into novels and poems. What was left? Still, I thought I might write a few lines --something to complete the account book of my life and at the end, seal it with this revenue stamp as it were. Or am I with this revenue stamp setting a seal to my novels and poems…my entire, literary work…I wonder." In the contemporary Punjabi literature, she is an indisputable phenomenon who has virtually no parallel.