Amrita Pritam is one of the best known Punjabi authors and poets was a writer, a mystic, a poet, a rebel and a human being par excellence. She wrote about love, hope, separation, feminism, partition and struggles of women . She could be a synonym for ‘Freedom’. She lived life on her own terms but without being a confrontationist. She was honoured with some of the highest awards in the country including the Sahitya Akademi, Bharatiya Jnanpith, and Padma Vibhushan. Amrita was the first woman to win the renowned award. She won in 1956 for her poem ‘Sunehade’ (Messages). The poem is considered to be her magnum opus. Her autobiography Rasidi Ticket was a dignified answer to Khushwant Singh for his less than charitable remarks about her.
Born in Mandi Bahauddin in Gujranwala,West Punjab in 1919, she lost her mother when she was barely eleven. Her father Kartar Singh was a learned man with spiritual leanings who left a deep impact on a motherless Amrita. Amrita was not religious, she was spiritual. She mentions in her autobiography that when her mother was ailing, she prayed to God to spare her mother’s life, believing that God answers children’s prayers, but when her mother died, so did her faith in God. After her mother’s death, Amrita found solace in writing. Her first publication was an anthology of poetry, ‘Amrit Lehran’ (Immortal Waves)
She had been betrothed to Pritam Singh in her childhood. He was the son of a leading hosiery merchant of Lahore’s Anarkali bazaar and an Editor. It is from him that she gets her last name Pritam. She married him in 1936, at the age of 16 however her marriage wasn’t a happy one she felt suffocated in the marriage. By this time Amrita had started writing poetry and fell for another upcoming poet Sahir, a love story that changed Amrita’s life but also left a few scars. Partition brought Amrita to Delhi. She was shattered beyond words and while travelling between Dehradun and Delhi, she penned one of her most memorable poems.
She left her marriage and husband Pritam Singh in 1960.
Aj aakhan warris shah nu kitte qabran whichon bol (I urge Warris Shah to speak out from his grave). She mentions in her writings that she saw corpses and corpse-like human beings; nobody could have imagined such a gory scene of bloodshed and hatred. While travelling alone at the age of 28 in unfamiliar surroundings in a train between Delhi and Dehradun, she thought of the great Sufi poet Warris Shah who gave Punjabi literature its greatest love epic Heer, and mentally held a conversation with him asking him to come out of his grave and add another page to his sad love story that immortalised the lovers Heer and Ranjha. She mourns that, “If you could write such an epic for one woman (Heer), now lakhs of women are being killed, raped and maimed…someone has poisoned the waters of our soil… come out and add this chapter to your epic.” Her longtime friend from Lahore, Sajjad Haider, told Amrita that her poem had become a symbol of Partition in Pakistan. Ahmed Nadeem Kasmi mentioned that people of Pakistan read this poem and shed tears.
Unforgettable is the gutwrenching tale of Partition in Pinjar, a novel beautifully made into a film by Chander Prakash Dwivedi. In Pinjar, Amrita draws a graphic account of the savagery of Partition without mincing words: The communal flare ups, the helplessness of women and an eternal urge to break away from all this. After Partition, Amrita was working for All India Radio for a while, even while her relationship with Sahir had gone into a ‘silent’ mode. This is when Amrita wrote her Sahitya Akademi Award-winning Sunehade (messages). Sunehade was actually supposed to be Amrita’s oneway conversation with Sahir who had become incommunicado when climbing the ladders of success as a lyricist in the glamour city of Bombay.
When the Sahitya Akademi Award was announced, she exclaimed, “Oh my God, I did not write Sunehade for any award. If the person for whom it was written has not taken note of it,what do I care if even the whole world has seen it”. She writes somewhere that she went out to make a phone call to Sahir, but just as she was about to dial Sahir’s number, she noticed a news article and a photograph in Blitz, a popular weekly of those times, which read: “Sahir has found his new Love”. Amrita mentions her hands stopped in midair and she returned home from the telephone booth.
She later wrote Sat Baras (seven years) on the silence between her and Sahir. If Sahir’s popularity was its peak, Amrita was touching new horizons with her sensitive writing, expressing the anguish of women of this planet. She was a progressive writer and wrote extensively about the exploitation of the poor. And then walked in a Sufi of a lover in Amrita’s life: Inderjeet, a Punjabi painter who illustrated the popular journal Shama brought out by Dehlavis (Yunus and Yusuf). Popularly known as Imroze, Inderjeet, ten years younger to Amrita, was, as if waiting in the wings to come and hold her during her worst days of loneliness. Imroze soon became her Man Friday, so much so that when Amrita was nominated to Rajya Sabha, Imroze would drive her to and from Parliament. He was her lover, companion, adviser, errand boy and man about the house all rolled into one. Here was this Neo-Heer meeting his Ranjha, thus quenching the thirst of an ever-wandering soul of a mystic poet, writer of an era when fractured humanity was looking for answers to the madness around them. One could write volumes about Imroze and Amrita, but it suffices to say that such lovers are beyond the physical.
Amrita and Imroze were personification of Warris’s most popular lines Ranjha ranjha karde main aape ranjha hoyee (Seeking my lover Ranjha so intensely that I have become a Ranjha myself). Imroze loved her passionately and, for Amrita, it was the fulfilment of a dream. It was love without boundaries and love without any condition. Imroze knew of Amrita’s love for Sahir but he never resented this. As a matter of fact, the two became friends, and Imroze designed the cover of Sahir’s book Aao koyee khwab bunne (Let us weave a dream). He told Amrita that he knew how much she loved Sahir but emphasised that he also knew how much he himself loved Amrita.
Such was his love for Amrita that he had no other concern in life except for being with her. When her soul finally departed her body on October 31, 2005, Imroze did not believe it at first.
Imroze wrote about Amrita’s departure: Till yesterday, life had a tree laden with flowers, fruits and fragrance and today life has a narrative…but living narrative…about the same tree… which has become a seed and the seed has merged with the winds and flown away…God alone knows in search of what kind of a soil.
Amrita Pritam and Sahil Ludhianvi – Immortal Love
Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda wrote, “Difficult is to define love; all the more tricky to define ours…” Neruda’s words are apt for Amrita and Sahir’s love. Theirs was a kind of love that cannot be described but felt — Sirf ahsaas hai ye rooh se mahsoos karo, pyaar ko pyaar hi rahne do koi naam na do (It’s a feeling to be felt by the soul/Let love remain love, don’t defile it by giving a name).
Amrita had a sapiosexual crush on Sahir, whom she adored as qalam ka jaadugar (wizard of pen). In fact, the very takhallus (nom de guerre) of Sahir — his actual name was Abdul Hayee — means a magician. Unhappy in a suffocating marital bond, Amrita looked for freedom; freedom of soul, spirit and mind. “Tumhare darakht ki tahani ka jo aasra mila/Mere toote hue dil ka parinda wahin ruk gaya (When I found the branch of your tree/ The bird of my broken heart perched there permanently)”. Amrita wrote this couplet to Sahir in the initial days of their courtship.
Deeply committed to his mother Sardar Begum, Sahir had a quasi-oedipal predilection for Amrita as she was also a couple of years older to him. Though both loved each other quite profoundly, it was Amrita who loved Sahir more, vindicating Byronic dictum in Don Juan — ‘Man’s love is in a man’s life, a thing apart/’Tis a woman’s whole existence.’ “Main tumhari hokar rah gayee/Tum mera mukammal vajood ban gaye (I became yours/You became my whole existence)”.
Somewhere, Amrita knew that Sahir had a commitment phobia and his love for her was not as intense. Elsewhere, she wrote to him, “Maine toot ke pyaar kiya tum se/Kya tumne bhi utna kiya mujh se? (I loved you wholeheartedly/ Did you also love me that much?)”. In fact, this couplet appeared in her last letter to Sahir which she personally handed over to him and had the last cup of coffee and a fag with the mercurial poet.
While leaving Sahir’s place for the last time, Amrita quoted Byron (she seldom quoted English poets): “In her first love, woman loves her lover/ In all the others, all she loves is love.” Sahir calmly asked her, “Aap jaane se pahle iska tarjuma kar dengi? (Before leaving, will you please translate it?)”. Amrita wrote in her memoirs that whenever Sahir was not happy with her or sulking, he’d use aap for her instead of tum.
Their last meeting was very poignant. Pakistani activist and Amrita Pritam’s dear friend, the late Fahmida Riyaz wrote a piece — Amrita ki Sahir se aakhri mulaaqaat: Amrita’s last meeting with Sahir) — in Pakistani Urdu daily Jung. Amrita told her that while parting, Sahir said poetically to her: Tum chali jaaogi, parchhaiyaan rah jaayengi/Kuchh na kuchh Ishq ki raanaaiyaan rah jaayengi (Fahmida figuratively translated it: When you leave, your lovely silhouettes shall remain/ Memories and traces of love will smart me time and again). This impromptu couplet was later to be immortalised in Muhammad Rafi’s voice for Shagoon (1964), replacing ishq with husn. This is the only instance when Sahir requested Rafi for a retake despite the fastidious Khayyam okaying the number. He requested Rafi to sing it again to capture the essence of the word Raanaaiyaan because he added: “Ye Amrita ke liye hai, chunanche aapko zahmat dee (I’ve troubled you because it’s for Amrita!).” Rafi obliged wholeheartedly.
Though separated, both could never forget each other. Sahir fell for Sudha Malhotra but Amrita remained his only love. And when he got to know Amrita found someone (Imroz), he wrote, “Mujhe apni tabahiyon ka koi gham nahin/ Tumne kisi se muhabbat nibaah toh dee (I’m not sad over my losses and ruins/ I’m happy that finally you found someone worth living for)”. Thus ended a tragic love affair with a very sound piece of advice to all future lovers:
Ta’arruf rog ho jaaye toh usko bhoolna behtar
Ta’alluq bojh ban jaaye toh usko todna achchha
Woh afsana jise takmeel tak laana na ho mumkin
Use ek khoobsoorat mod dekar chhodna achchha
(If familiarity becomes a disease, it’s better to forget it/If a relationship becomes a burden, better to break it/An affair that can’t reach its logical end/It’s advisable to leave at a pleasant turn).
It’s worthwhile to mention that anjaam in lieu of takmeel is only for the song to set its tune: Chalo ik baar phir se ajnabi ban jaayein hum dono(n) in the film Gumraah [1963] (Lyrics: Sahir Ludhianavi, Music: Ravishankar Sharma).
But then, love is love when it’s unrequited. We’d not have been writing reams of paper, had their love ended on a happy note. Lastly, to quote Sahir from his collection, Talkhiyaan:
Muhabbat jo anjaam tak pahunchi nahin/Wahi muhabbat hai, baaqi kuchh nahin (Love that remains unfulfilled/Is the true love, the rest doesn’t matter).