Khushwant Singh, who was a friend and meant it as a joke, once told Amrita Pritam that her life had been so uneventful that the whole of it could be written on the back of a revenue stamp.
She did not argue. She wrote the book and called it Rasidi Ticket — The Revenue Stamp — and it turned out to contain a broken marriage, a decades-long love conducted almost entirely in silence, forty years with a painter she never married, the loss of a homeland, and a poem that two countries have been reciting ever since. It is among the most candid books written by an Indian woman of her generation, and it exists because somebody told her she had nothing to say.
Gujranwala
She was born Amrit Kaur on 31 August 1919 at Gujranwala, in the western Punjab that is now Pakistan. Her father, Kartar Singh Hitkari, was a poet and a scholar of Braj Bhasha and edited a literary journal; verse was the household trade. Her mother died when Amrita was eleven.
That death did two things to her writing, by her own account. It ended her childhood early, and it ended her belief in prayer — she describes asking God for her mother's life, being refused, and never quite going back. The family moved to Lahore, and she published her first collection at sixteen, in the same year she was married.
The marriage had been arranged in her infancy, to Pritam Singh, the son of a Lahore hosiery merchant. She was sixteen. She kept his name for the rest of her life, long after she had left him, and became the only major Punjabi writer known by a name she had stopped having any use for.
Lahore, and the Break
The Amrita Pritam of the late 1930s wrote the pious, conventional verse expected of a young woman, and then stopped.
What she moved toward was direct, plain-spoken and personal, about love and the body and dissatisfaction, in a literary culture that did not think those were women's subjects. She was associated with the Progressive Writers' Movement, which gave her both a politics and a peer group. She was also, by the 1940s, being read — and being talked about, which in her case amounted to much the same thing.
In 1944 she met the Urdu poet Sahir Ludhianvi at a gathering in Preet Nagar, the writers' colony between Lahore and Amritsar. What followed is the most famous unconsummated relationship in modern South Asian letters. She wrote about it for decades: the cigarettes he left behind that she smoked down to the butts to have touched what he had touched; his name written over and over; the fact that they were rarely in the same room and said almost nothing when they were. He went to Bombay and to film lyrics. She stayed with it.
The Train
In 1947 the province came apart. She was pregnant, in flight, moving from Dehradun toward Delhi in the vast movement of people going the other way from her birthplace.
Somewhere on that journey she wrote "Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu" on a scrap of paper.
The poem does not describe the violence. It addresses a dead poet. Waris Shah, who in 1766 had given Punjab its telling of Heer, is called up out of his grave and asked to look at what has happened — the argument being that he had filled an entire book over the sorrow of one daughter of Punjab, and there are now a million of them.
Today I call upon Waris Shah: speak from your grave. One daughter of Punjab once wept, and you filled whole pages; today a million daughters weep, and they turn to you, Waris Shah.
It is a very short poem, and it did something no political statement of that year managed. It is recited in Lahore and in Amritsar, in Gurmukhi and in Shahmukhi, by Muslims and Sikhs and Hindus, and it belongs to none of them in particular. She had reached past 1947 to 1766 and found the one thing the two halves of Punjab still held in common.
Pinjar
If the poem made the grief sayable, the 1950 novel Pinjar — "The Skeleton" — made it specific.
Its heroine, Puro, is a young Hindu woman abducted by a Muslim man before Partition in settlement of an old family score. When she escapes back to her parents, they will not take her: she is polluted, and their standing will not survive her. She returns to her captor, is married to him, becomes Hamida, and lives out the rest of the book as a woman who exists in the records of neither community.
That was not what was being written about in 1950. The public story of Partition was one of trains, columns and borders; the abducted women were a matter for the Central Recovery Operation, a bureaucratic problem, and their own families were often the ones who would not have them home. Pinjar is a book about a woman being twice refused, and it does not offer any consolation for it. It reached new readers as a well-received 2003 film, but the novel's reputation never depended on that.
A Life Lived in Public
She left her marriage in 1960 and moved to Delhi, where she lived for the rest of her life.
From the mid-1960s she shared a house with the artist Imroz — born Inderjeet Singh — who was several years younger, designed nearly all her book covers, and painted her repeatedly across four decades. They never married. He is generally said to have known perfectly well about Sahir and to have been entirely unbothered; the story she tells in Rasidi Ticket, of absent-mindedly tracing Sahir's name on Imroz's back while riding pillion on his scooter, is repeated so often precisely because of how he took it.
That arrangement, conducted openly in the Delhi of the 1960s and 70s, cost her. She was a divorced woman living unmarried with a younger man and writing frankly about desire, and a good deal of what was said about her at the time was about that rather than about the work.
In 1966 she founded Nagmani, a Punjabi literary monthly, and edited it for more than three decades — much of it produced from the house, and much of it a platform for younger writers who had nowhere else to publish. It is the least glamorous item on her record and possibly the most consequential.
The Honours, and What They Were For
The recognition arrived steadily and from every direction. The Sahitya Akademi Award in 1956, for the poetry collection Sunehade, made her the first woman to receive it. The Padma Shri followed in 1969. In 1982 she was given the Bharatiya Jnanpith, India's foremost literary prize, for Kagaz Te Canvas. She sat in the Rajya Sabha as a nominated member from 1986 to 1992. In 2004, the year before her death, she received the Padma Vibhushan and the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship.
She wrote something close to a hundred books. She was translated into many languages, and read across the border in Pakistan throughout a period when very little crossed it.
She died in Delhi on 31 October 2005, aged eighty-six.
Why the Voice Still Carries
The obvious reason is the poem, and the poem is genuinely enough. But what keeps her from settling into a monument is that she was not a dignified writer. She was an indiscreet one.
She wrote about wanting things she was not supposed to want, about a marriage she did not want to be in, about a man she did not have, and about a man she did have and would not marry. She did it in Punjabi, in public, in a century that had strong views about women who did that. The critical establishment spent a fair amount of energy on her private life and rather less on the fact that she had given Punjabi prose and verse a first-person voice it did not previously have.
The revenue stamp remark was wrong in an interesting way. Khushwant Singh meant that nothing had happened to her. What she demonstrated, over four hundred pages, was that a great deal had — and that most of it was the sort of thing her contemporaries were careful to leave out.