The many loves of Amrita Pritam — Remembering the celebrated writer on her 99th birth anniversary

The very last time Nirupama Dutt visited Amrita Pritam, poppies with blood-red strokes in hand, she witnessed the slow, palpable spectacle of death. Unusually forlorn, visibly encumbered with pain, Amrita would not look at Dutt, let alone make prosaic conversation. Where love had been the epithet of life, death had now entered, an impervious presence, and made itself too comfortable. Imroz, Amrita’s lover and beloved, “cheered up, propped Amrita’s head on the pillows, and said, ‘Forget your pain and age. Just look (emphasis mine) at the flowers coloured with the prime of youth and love.’” In their last exchange thereafter, Amrita would ask, “So Niru, any new love?” So significantly could love move Amrita Pritam that even death would be defeated. Like death’s many triumphs, she, too, would succumb to mortality, as she did on 31 October, 2005. But her many loves would outlive her, as she would outlive her death. Indeed, the presence of Amrita Pritam has not left, obstinate in its refusal to be surrendered unread. She left a lover and a lover she returns to contemporary imagination, in the diligent reiterations commemorating the anniversaries of her birth and death. Every year, lovers and chroniclers of Amrita Pritam turn to this archival presence and derive from it the greatest pleasures “coloured with the prime of youth and love.” [caption id=“attachment_462878” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Amrita Pritam. PTI Image.[/caption] Her poetic promise to Imroz, in itself, is uncomplicated; it only promises the world. “Ae jism mukkda hai, tan sab kuch mukk janda / par cheteyan dey dhaage, kaayenaati kana dey hunde / main unha kana nu chunagi, dhageyan nu walangi, te tenu main fer milaangi…” (when the body perishes, then everything else ceases to be / but the threads of memory are the stardust of galaxies / I will cherry-pick those particles, weave them into threads, and I will meet you again) One has not read Pritam if one has not felt her final promise to Imroz – main tenu fer milaangi (I will meet you again) with a resonance that stultifies the literary tiredness of reading Amrita Pritam’s love as romance, year after year. This is not to imply that Pritam did not romance her lovers and life itself. Her first anthology, Amrit Lehran (Immortal Waves, 1936), published in the very year of her marriage to Pritam Singh, is an ode to romance. She was sixteen. Her famous and infamous relationship with Sahir Ludhianvi, both the background and progression of her failed marriage to Singh, is, like Pritam herself, poetic legend. In Rasidi Ticket  (The Revenue Stamp), her remembered autobiography, we are told, in vivid detail, of a romance mediated by the motif of the cigarette – Ludhianvi would smoke, gazing into Pritam’s eyes with studied silence, and after he had left, Pritam would carry the stubs to her lips in the mimicry and anticipation of embrace. When Ludhianvi was unwell, Pritam rubbed ointment on his chest and arms, wishing that “I could live in this moment forever.” She did not. Of Imroz, there are no legends, but immortal elegies. With willing pleasure, these have become the template of Amrita Pritam’s memory, foreclosing the universe of love that she imagined, wrote, and lived.

Amrita Pritam was a lover, even a being of love, but to represent this love only as romantic passion is to stifle its political promise.

So titanic was its reach, so rarefied its texture that it could hold a universe. In this, Amrita Pritam leaves us not merely with a different, more democratic conception of love, but a new vocabulary – one that we have not read, let alone used. The misreading is unsurprising, even patterned. Love, as we are condemned to live it, demands a scriptural performative, or what we know to be romance. Romance is certainly desire where the body must be fulcrum, but it must also flow mediated. As this is written, Hadiya, a ‘convert’ of love to Islam, fights romance with love, merely for the inexorable crime (and by the script, it is one) of transgressing, in her desire, the performance which asks that she love along acceptable circuits of caste, class, religion, gender. But Hadiya refuses compliance to love as acceptable romance, and it is only in this courage and love that Amrita Pritam can be remembered, if she is to be remembered against biography. In 1947, Amrita Pritam confronted, like many others in Punjab, a macabre of violence that would come to be known and lived as the Partition of British India. Faced with relentless bloodshed and a personal deracination from Lahore to Delhi, Pritam turned, as ever, to poetry. This would become the venerated nazm – Ajj aakhaan Waris Shah nu (Today, I call Waris Shah). Appalled and horrified by the face of religious violence, she invokes Waris Shah not in castigation, but in the plea to witness, as she is, unthinkable horrors. To be implored to return (“utth dard-mandaan diya dardiya, utth tak apna Punjab” – rise, look at your Punjab!) Waris Shah must hear of these horrors, which are painstakingly narrativised: “Aaj bailey lashaan bichiyaan, tey lahoo di bhari Chenab / kissey ne Panjaan Paaniyan wich, diti zahar rala / tey unhan paniyaan dharat nuu, dita paani laa” (Today, fields are lined with corpses and blood fills the Chenab / someone has mixed poison in thhe five rivers’ flow / their deadly water is, now, irrigating our lands galore) It is interesting that this spectral violence leads Pritam to the memory of Waris Shah, the cherished Sufi writer of Heer Ranjha, an inglorious legend of the many tragedies of love. For Waris Shah, it represented the mystical difficulty of communion between the self and the divine. For Amrita Pritam, the nazm was a call from one lover to another in what had become a loveless world. “There were those who starting abusing me,” she writes, “castigating me on why I took up a Mussalman Waris Shah? The ones of Sikh faith asserted that I should have written on Guru Nanak, while communists complained that I have ignored Lenin.” In ‘Akhar’ (Words), the spirit of the nazm is revealed: “The fire lit by the poet Waris / I have inherited the same within me.” (Nonica Datta’s quotations) What is this fire but love? The nazm inaugurates Amrita Pritam’s life in her radical universe of love – she remains the ardent lover, but here she is a lover of Punjab, its syncretic pasts and presents, of individuals and communities she must now hate; here, she returns, like Waris Shah, as the young Amrita who made her first baghavat by questioning the separation of utensils for her father’s Muslim friends. Hereon, Amrita Pritam, and her love, is unstoppable. In further work, Pritam introduces her subjectivity as a woman and ‘engenders’ both lived reality and the Partition of British India. She is unmistakably unafraid in portraying desire as unfettered and fantasies real. Although Nirupama Dutt calls her “a feminist before feminists,” Pritam captures the illusive impulse that is feminism – of love, for others and oneself, held in the acknowledgement that we are, and can be, more than the beings that patriarchy imagines for us. Her unfazed resistance to “the youth of body forced into motherhood” is the revolt of love against the compulsoriness of certain futures. In her celebrated Pinjar (Skeleton), we receive the figure of Pooru, a Hindu girl abducted by Rashid, a Muslim man, during the fateful partition. Pooru stays on in Pakistan, for her family could not, now, accept a woman who had been ‘defiled’ by a Mussalman. Pooru accepts this subjugation of romance, but not with the kindness that patriarchy would expect of her. In Pinjar’s dazzling narrative, Pooru positions her struggle against patriarchy and even the nation-form in a remarkable act of love.

Another dimension of Amrita Pritam’s many loves, however uncomfortable its recognition has been, was otherworldly – in her later years, Pritam was attracted to Rajneesh, or Osho. Potently mystical themes begin to mark her literary life, most notably in Kaal Chetna (Time Consciousness) and Agyat ka Nimantran (Call of the Unknown). Her obituary in The Guardian reviles that she followed “tantric practices and the Bhagwan Rajneesh of Pune unquestionably.”

But this, too, as her nazm, was an invocation of Waris Shah and the indeterminable mystical quest. “When Osho’s voice rustles in one’s interior like a soft breeze,” she writes, “I can say on my own authority that the dormant seed of consciousness starts sprouting. Then the flower of countless colours that blooms can have any name to it. It blooms also as a Gautam Buddha, it blooms also as a Mahavira, it blooms also as a Nanak.” Yet, for her many loves, Amrita Pritam was of human failing. Professional malpractice was alleged in the case of her Sahitya Akademi Award, wherein she purportedly cast a vote in her own favour in the selection panel, and when Krishna Sobti alleged plagiarism in the title of her Zindaginamah. Pritam maintained an ominous silence on the two disquiets of postcolonial India that impinged on her personal and political world – the Operation Blue Star in which the akhal-takht was desecrated, and the anti-Sikh massacre that followed Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination in conspiratorial political complicity. Reginald Massey found it ‘repellent’ that Pritam kept a portrait of Indira Gandhi by her bedside, believing that they had been sisters in an incarnation. But it is only in human failing that love can take a radical presence. Amrita Pritam’s many loves did not come from the extraordinariness unthinkingly read into figures we render prominent, but a rustic humanity of many failings. To her mortal end, she remained a lover who could forget pain and age through poppies of blood-red strokes merely for representing the prime of love. The memory of this love cannot remain constricted to romance, and Amrita Pritam cannot forever be its biography. Note: This column was originally published on 31 October 2017, to commemorate Amrita Pritam’s 12th death anniversary