The calm and serene lyrics of Amrita Pritam’s Punjabi poem “Main Tenu Phir Milangi”, evoke a wide range of emotions in everyone. Although these lines are said to have been written for her companion, Imroz, with whom she spent the last forty years of her life, they seem to speak to Amrita and all the people who love her poems.
Amrita was more than an essayist, novelist and poetess; She was a woman who broke all social norms and made her own identity as the embodiment of revolution.
On the occasion of his birth anniversary, let us recall some little-known aspects of his life:
Amrit Kaur, born in 1919 in Mandi Bahauddin, Punjab (modern Pakistan), lost her mother when she was eleven years old. Amrita began writing at an early age, rejected adult duties and suffered from loneliness after the death of her mother, and in 1936 at the age of 16 her first collection of poetry, Amrit Lehren (Immortal Waves) published.
In the same year she married Pritam Singh (son of a hosiery trader at Anarkali Bazaar in Lahore), with whom she was engaged since childhood, and named her Amrita Pritam.
Not many people know that his father Kartar Singh Hitkari himself was a poet. He was also a scholar and editor of Braj Bhasha, as published by Feminist Press in 1991.
Amrita and her poems were inspired and influenced by the songs of poet and lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi. She had loved him for years, and she wrote about it in her memoirs. Long silence, deep gaze and silent agony were the hallmarks of Ludhianvi’s love. They often resembled each other, but never completely crossed the gap that set them apart, Ludhianvi calls what we today call ‘commitment-fear’.
In his last letter to Sahir, which he personally handed over to him, he wrote: “Main tut ke pyar kiya tum se / Have you done so much to me?”
India’s independence in 1947 came at the high cost of partition and communal bloodshed. Amrita, 28, also had to become a Punjabi refugee and shifted from Lahore to Delhi. In the same year, while she was pregnant and traveling from Dehradun to Delhi, she wrote Ajj Aakhan Waris Shah Nu, a poem on her feelings on Partition.
Amrita was also a strong believer of Osho, and wrote several introductions to his works, including an Onkar Satnam.
She climbed from humble beginnings to become a prominent literary icon, not only in Punjabi and English, but in the many other languages in which her writings were translated. For her magnum opus, Sunehre, a long poem, she was the first woman to win the Sahitya Akademi Award (Sandesh). He later received the Bharatiya Jnanpith, India’s highest literary award.
Pritam has left a rich and memorable legacy for all his fans and lovers. Even though he is no longer physically with us, his following phrase is a treat for Imroz, for us, and for literature…
“I will meet Tenu again..”
read all Latest Lifestyle News And today’s fresh news Here