TRIBUTE
An alternative voice of history
NONICA DATTA
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Amrita Pritam's idea of cultural community and identity testifies to a social history of Punjab's shared cultural symbols, motifs and landscapes.
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Living with Tragedy: Partition played a crucial role in the formation of Amrita Pritam's worldview. The Hindu Photo Library
AMRITA PRITAM (1919-2005) died on October 31, 2005. This brief note is not meant as an obituary. Nor does it intend to evaluate her works. Perhaps, her death is a moment to reflect on her long-standing engagement with Punjab's culture and history. Significantly, her reading of Partition and its invocation is a foray into the social history of Punjab, even if it lacks the rigour of a historian's craft.
Quite often, Amrita Pritam's life history shows that Partition is a crucial moment in defining her worldview; it enables her to forge a kainaati rishta (fraternal relationship) with the universe, and create a world in tune with Punjab's cultural landscape. Her childhood memory, as evoked in her autobiography, Raseedi Ticket, goes back to her mother's village in Gujranwala, where she notices water being hawked at the railway platform as Hindu pani and Muslim pani. She questions her mother — "Is water also Hindu-Mussalman?" All that her mother, Raj Kaur, could say was: "It happens here, God knows what all happens next." Later, the young Amrita raises her voice against her grandmother, who keeps the utensils separately for her father's Muslim friends. This was "my first baghavat (revolt) against religion", she writes.
Against politics of hate
As a witness to Punjab's Partition, Amrita Pritam writes: "In 1947, Lahore was turned into a graveyard. It was the politics of hate that engulfed Lahore in flames; at night one would see houses being swept in flames, hear cries of pain, while the day would be spent witnessing long hours of curfew." Thus began her journey as a Punjabi refugee. She was 28 years old then and pregnant. While travelling from Dehradun to Delhi, in 1948, she wrote the nazm "Aj Ankha Waris Shah", on a scrap of paper. The poem turned out to be her signature tune. But "there were those who started abusing me in newspaper columns, castigating me on why I took up a Mussalman Waris Shah? The ones of Sikh faith asserted I should have written on Guru Nanak, while communists complained that I have ignored Lenin."
In her genre, Amrita Pritam uses the qissa (story) tradition and is influenced by Shah Hussain (1538-1599), Sultan Bahu (1629-1691), Waris Shah (c. 1736-1790) and Bulle Shah (1680-1757). She thus reflects on Punjab's cultural history and regional identity, and dwells on how sectarian identities can be vanquished by the epiphany of love. In many ways, Punjabi qissas enabled her to cope with the painful reality of Partition, as they nurtured her emotional and creative self. At the time of Partition and its ensuing violence, the Sufi poets became her companions. Though by birth a Sikh, her "literary inheritance" was the epitome of "fire of life" that "burnt in the love legends of Sohni, Sassi and Heer". She writes in her autobiographical poem "Akhar" (Words), "The fire lit by the poet Waris", "I have inherited the same within me". And yet, she laments, "nobody nourishes fire in the city of stones". The tragic death of the legendary lovers reflects her own disenchantment with societal and political pressures, and her creative rejection of assertive religious identities. And by using the love legends of Sufi poets, she evokes the potentiality of a cultural identity that questions the very historicity of Partition.
Festering wound
Amrita Pritam writes, "the Partition of India continued to become a festered wound in the bosom of history. Nobody would ever know — that the dreams of how many girls of this country were slaughtered... Then I had written a long poem, "Tavarikh" (History), which echoes the voice of a young girl, who like thousands of other such girls, got lost somewhere." She presents a woman's experience of Partition as universal and irreparable. "Who can sense the pain of such a girl — the youth of whose body is forced into motherhood?" She describes the trauma of rape through the metaphor of a mother's womb. The womb is a victim of Partition's madness: "I am the symbol of that accident". The "evil in the womb" manifests itself in the division of Punjab into two parts, like the violent rending of the womb. This was a helpless womb like an utterly helpless Punjab, and it bore "fruit", when, as she says, "the trees of independence were in bud". The dream of "independence" was shattered. The child that was born was in fact a "blackened spot". Her Punjab was, in many ways, a belated scar of the wound, as she narrates in her poem "Majboor".
Amrita Pritam expresses her disillusionment with Independence and the newly drawn territorial boundaries, which destroyed the rhythm and dreams of everyday life. In the poem, "Punjab di Kahani" (The Story of Punjab), for instance, she writes, "From out of nowhere Fate came galloping towards Punjab crushing Pothohar beneath the horses' hooves." She mourns that "at year's end, a flourishing Punjab was cut down in its green age". The poet transcends the tendency of indicting political leaders and parties, and holds "fate" to be responsible for the destruction of everyday life. By so doing, she not only expresses the anguish of Punjab, but also makes a claim about how Punjab was not in any way responsible for its vivisection.
Likewise in the poem, "Divided", Amrita Pritam conjures up the image of a "common motherland", and once again mourns the mutilation of rural Punjab. Written for her friend Sajjad Haider in Lahore, the poet laments the loss of her "neighbour", who was separated from her due to Partition. Amrita Pritam invokes many historically constructed pasts embodied in Punjab's rich cultural history, and opposes the religiously exclusive languages. In her poem "Junoon" (Frenzy), for example, religion is likened to a serpent's bite, and she condemns the politics of religious conversion and reconversion promoted by shuddhi and sangathan, tabligh and tanzim.
This is what she had to say on August 15, 1947:
These were the people who dared to dream
When they wept, the eyes of the times wept too
When they sang, they sang of sacrifice
These were the people ready to give away their lives
These were the people who coloured their hands in the henna of their own blood
These were the people who sang who drank the poison of slavery
These were the people who celebrated the hangings
These were the people who turned the reins of fate inside
These were the people who smashed the chains of their feet
These were the people who were the fulfilment of time
They are the paths, and the destinations
They are the ruins, and the foundations
Forever rooted/uprooted
O God of dreams, they are your lament, your complaint
They are something, and nothing
They are the question and the answer
They are patience, they are anger
They are something, they are nothing
They are the silence of the times
They are the revolution.
These ordinary people... These ordinary people... These ordinary people...
Lastly, her novel Pinjar (Skeleton) is a compelling account of her deeply personal experience of Partition and Independence. Perhaps Pinjar is Amrita's final testimony, as a witness, to Punjab's Partition. Here Amrita's Pooru defies patriarchal and territorial boundaries, and effectively uses her agency to critique the reality of Partition by choosing to stay on in Pakistan. Indeed, in times when religious identity became a brutal blueprint of territorial boundaries and nationalism, Amrita and her female protagonist criticise the elision of religious community with "nation", highlight patriarchal hypocrisy and challenge the national obsession with borders.
Amrita Pritam's idea of cultural community and identity testifies to a social history of Punjab's shared cultural symbols, motifs and landscapes. As a "refugee" and Partition victim, she offers an "alternative" voice of history, identity and Partition. Her life history is a striking challenge to the dominant political histories of 1947. Personally, there were many Amritas one had known. And yet her Partition experience appears to represent her identity as a bold and dignified survivor to many of us. The trauma of Partition acted as an impulse to her poetical compositions.
Nonica Datta teaches History at Miranda House, Delhi University.
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