Amrita Pritam
Novelist, poet, essayist
Died when: 86 years 61 days (1034 months)Star Sign: Virgo
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Amrita Pritam was an Indian novelist, essayist and poet, who wrote in Punjabi and Hindi.A prominent figure in Punjabi literature, she is the recipient of the 1956 Sahitya Akademi Award.
Her body of work comprised over 100 books of poetry, fiction, biographies, essays, a collection of Punjabi folk songs and an autobiography that were all translated into several Indian and foreign languages.
Pritam is best remembered for her poignant poem, Ajj aakhaan Waris Shah nu (Today I invoke Waris Shah – "Ode to Waris Shah"), an elegy to the 18th-century Punjabi poet, an expression of her anguish over massacres during the partition of India.
As a novelist, her most noted work was Pinjar ("The Skeleton", 1950), in which she created her memorable character, Puro, an epitome of violence against women, loss of humanity and ultimate surrender to existential fate; the novel was made into an award-winning film, Pinjar (2003).
When India was partitioned into the independent states of India and Pakistan in 1947, she migrated from Lahore, to India, though she remained equally popular in Pakistan throughout her life, as compared to her contemporaries like Mohan Singh and Shiv Kumar Batalvi.
Pritam's magnum opus, a long poem, Sunehade won her the 1956 Sahitya Akademi Award, making her the first and the only woman to have been given the award for a work in Punjabi.
She later received the Bharatiya Jnanpith, one of India's highest literary awards, in 1982 for Kagaz Te Canvas ("The Paper and the Canvas").
The Padma Shri came her way in 1969 and finally, Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian award, in 2004, and in the same year she was honoured with India's highest literary award, given by the Sahitya Akademi (India's Academy of Letters), the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship given to the "immortals of literature" for lifetime achievement. she wrote her poems mostly for the partition
