Amrita Pritam

Amrita Pritam was born in 1919 in Gujranwala in a part of India which later became Pakistan. She was the only child of a school teacher and a poet. Her mother died when she was eleven and she grew up with adult responsibilities. She began to write at an early age, and her first collection was published when she was only sixteen years old, the year she married an editor to whom she was engaged in early childhood. In 1947 at the time of the Partition she moved to New Delhi, where she began to write in Hindi as opposed to Punjabi, her mother tongue. She worked until 1961 for All India Radio. She was divorced in 1960 and since then her work has become more explicitly feminist, drawing on her unhappy marriage in many of her stories and poems. A number of her works have been translated into English, including her autobiographical works Black Rose and Revenue Stamp.

There was a grief I smoked
in silence, like a cigarette

only a few poems fell
out of the ash I flicked from it.

Translated by Jennifer Barber and Irfan Malik.

Writing Available Online

Wild Flower, a short story in Little Magazine.

Sahiban, a short story in Little Magazine.

Stench of Kerosene. Translated by Khushwant Singh, published in Land of Five Rivers (Orient Paperbacks).

About Amrita Pritam

A tribute in bharatnet.com

Biography at punjabilok

A needle of light. Article by Manmohan Singh.

Bibliography

Skeleton


A novel in Punjabi about Partition. Translated by Khushwant Singh.




Ode to Waris Shah


Original and translation.

South Asian Women authors
Sawnet Bookshelf
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