Amrita Pritam

Categories: Indian people stubs | 1919 births | 2005 deaths | Indian writers | Punjab, India | Padma Vibhushan awardees

Amrita Pritam (August 31, 1919 – October 31, 2005) (Gurmukhi: ਅਮ੍ਰਿਤਾ ਪ੍ਰੀਤਮ, Devanagari: अमृता प्रीतम) is a famous Punjabi poet and writer living in India since 1947, when India and Pakistan were divided as two separate countries.

She was born in 1919 to a Sikh family in Gujranwala, presently in Pakistan. She was very sad when more or less one million Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs were brutally killed in communal violence during the partition. She has written extensively about that human dilemma. According to Sawnet.org, "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."

Her novel Pinjar was made in to a Hindi movie. She is a recipient of the Padma Vibhushan award.

Amerita Pritam passed away on 31st October 2005 at the age of 86 after a long illness.

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