Be a Member of this BLOG

Search This Blog

Jul 20, 2013

Pinjer: Amrita Pritma

One of the first voices portraying the pain of Partition was that of Punjabi poet and fiction writer Amrita Pritam. And for a long time the only feminine voice viewing Partition from a woman’s perspective. Chroniclers of the women’s stories of Partition like Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin were to enter the area nearly four decades later.

What made her first poem after Partition Ajj Akhan Waris Shah Nu… most poignant was the fact that Amrita was eyewitness to the horrors of Partition and also a victim. She was among the thousands who migrated from West Punjab to make their home across the fence. Her two most outstanding works literary works are the Waris Shah poem, penned in winter after the bloody month of August in 1947, and her novel Pinjar,which appeared in the early fifties.

The novel was too radical for its times because the wounds had not yet healed and the communal hatred as still at its peak. Even in those difficult times, Amrita was able to write a novel that saw the situation from the point of view of the other. In fact, it is only recently that a Pakistani filmmaker Sabiha Sumar has been able to tell a similar story on celluloid. It is this novel that has brought the ailing 86-year-old writer the La Route des Indes Literary Prize from France for its French translation. Long ago, the novel had been translated by Khushwant Singh and published with the title The Skeleton by Jaico. It was reprinted when Chandra Prakash Dwivedi made it into a feature film in 2002.

Amrita’s partner Imroz says the award came as a surprise because they were unaware of the translation by Denis Matringe. Denis was a French teacher in Lahore who heard someone singing Heer and was inspired to learn Punjabi. He also married a Punjabi girl later. Speaking of this novel, Imroz says: "It was very radical. A Muslim boy abducts a Hindu girl and she chooses to remain with him rather than be rehabilitated in India after Partition. It was a saga of love of a couple thrown in a situation not of their making, but they rise above the situation with love and caring." Imroz reveals that a number of filmmakers toyed with the idea of making a film on it and some contracts were also signed. But each time the project was given up because it was felt that the story would not be palatable to the masses. "It was only when the new century came, did someone dare to film it," Imroz adds.

Amrita is too ill to remark on this surprise award but when Dwivedi’s film was made, she was able to see it at home on a DVD although she was bedridden. I recall her saying, "The most terrible happening of the times was the Partition. I still shiver when I think of those blood-drenched days. I had already spoken of the fate of women in the frenzy in my poetry. After Partition Shahnawaz Khan and Mrinalini Sarabhai were involved in the rehabilitation of abducted girls. I would listen to the stranger than fiction stories that they told me. It was thus that Puro of Pinjar took shape and the novel wrote itself.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

All Posts

" Indian "Tomb of Sand A Fine Balance A House for Mr. Biswas Absurd Drama Achebe Across the Black Waters Addison Adiga African Ages Albee Alberuni Ambedkar American Amrita Pritam Anand Anatomy of Criticism Anglo Norman Anglo Saxon Aristotle Ariyar Arnold Ars Poetica Auden Augustan Aurobindo Ghosh Backett Bacon Badiou Bardsley Barthes Baudelaire Beckeley Bejnamin Belinda Webb Bellow Beowulf Bhabha Bharatmuni Bhatnagar Bijay Kant Dubey Blake Bloomsbury Book Bookchin Booker Prize bowen Braine British Brooks Browne Browning Buck Burke CA Duffy Camus Canada Chaos Characters Charlotte Bronte Chaucer Chaucer Age China Chomsky Coetzee Coleridge Conard Contact Cornelia Sorabji Critical Essays Critics and Books Cultural Materialism Culture Dalit Lliterature Daruwalla Darwin Dattani Death of the Author Deconstruction Deridda Derrida Desai Desani Dickens Dilip Chitre Doctorow Donne Dostoevsky Dryden Durkheim EB Browning Ecology Edmund Wilson Eliot Elizabethan Ellison Emerson Emile Emily Bronte English Epitaph essats Essays Esslin Ethics Eugene Ionesco Existentialism Ezekiel Faiz Fanon Farrel Faulkner Feminism Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness Ferber Fitzgerald Foregrounding Formalist Approach Forster Foucault Frankfurt School French Freud Frost Frye Fyre Gandhi Geetanjali Shree Gender German Germany Ghosh Gilbert Adair Golding Gordimer Greek Gulliver’s Travels Gunjar Halliday Hard Times Hardy Harindranath Chattopadhyaya Hawthorne Hazara Hemingway Heyse Hindi Literature Historical Materialism History Homer Horace Hulme Hunt Huxley Ibsen In Memoriam India Indian. Gadar Indra Sinha Interview Ireland Irish Jack London Jane Eyre Japan JM Synge Johnson Joyce Joyce on Criticism Judith Wright Jumpa Lahiri Jussawalla Kafka Kalam Kalidasa Kamla Das Karnard Keats Keki N. Daruwala Kipling Langston Hughes Language Language of Paradox Larkin Le Clezio Lenin Lessing Levine Life of PI literary Criticism Luckas Lucretius Lyrical Ballads Macaulay Magazines Mahapatra Mahima Nanda Malory Mamang Dai Mandeville Manto Manusmrti Mao Marlowe Martel Martin Amis Marx Marxism Mary Shelley Maugham McCarry Medi Media Miller Milton Moby Dick Modern Mona Loy Morrison Movies Mulk Raj Anand Mytth of Sisyphus Nabokov Nahal Naidu Naipaul Narayan Natyashastra Neo-Liberalism NET New Criticism new historicism News Nietzsche Nikita Lalwani Nissim Ezekiel Niyati Pathak Niyati Pathank Nobel Prize O Henry Of Studies Okara Ondaatje Orientalism Orwell Pakistan Pamela Paradise Lost Pater Pinter Poems Poetics Poets Pope Post Feminism Post Modern Post Structuralism post-Colonialism Poststructuralism Preface to Shakespeare Present Prize Psycho Analysis Psychology and Form Publish Pulitzer Prize Puritan PWA Radio Ramanujan Ramayana Rape of the Lock Renaissance Restoration Revival Richardson Rime of Ancient Mariner RL Stevenson Rohinton Mistry Romantic Roth Rousseau Rushdie Russia Russian Formalism Sartre Sashi Despandey Satan Sati Savitri Seamus Heaney’ Shakespeare Shaw Shelley Shiv K.Kumar Showalter Sibte Hasan Slavery Slow Man Socialism Spender Spenser Sri Lanka Stage of Development Steinbeck Stories Subaltern Sufis Surrealism Swift Syed Amanuddin Tagore Tamil Literature Ted Hughes Tennyson Tennyson. Victorian Terms Tess of the D’Urbervilles The March The Metamorphsis The Order of Discourse The Outsider The Playboy of the Western World The Politics The Satanic Verses The Scarlet Letter The Transitional Poets The Waste Land The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction The Wuthering Heights Theatre of Absurd Theory Theory of Criticism Theory of Evolution Theory of Literature Thomas McEvilley Thoreau To the Lighthouse Tolstoy Touchstone Method Tughlaq Tulsi Badrinath Twain Two Uses of Language UGC-NET Ukraine Ulysses Untouchable Urdu Victorian Vijay Tendulkar Vikram Seth Vivekananda Voltaire Voyage To Modernity Walter Tevis War Webster Wellek West Indies Wharton Williams WJ Long Woolfe Wordsworth World Wars Writers WW-I WW-II Wycliff Xingjian Yeats Zadie Smith Zaheer Zizek Zoe Haller