Amrita Pritam
The leading woman poet of Punjabi, born in Gujranwala. Her elegy for Partition calls on Waris Shah to rise from his grave and write a new verse for the daughters of Punjab.
Amrita Pritam was born in 1919 in Gujranwala, the daughter of a schoolteacher and poet, and published her first poems at sixteen. She grew up in Lahore.
In 1947 she fled to India, and on the train wrote 'Ajj aakhaan Waris Shah nu', calling on the poet of Heer to rise from his grave and see the daughters of Punjab weeping. It became the lament of Partition on both sides. Her novel Pinjar tells of a Hindu girl abducted by a Muslim in the riots.
She wrote more than a hundred books, lived openly with the painter Imroz, and was the first woman to win the Sahitya Akademi award, in 1956, and the first Punjabi writer to win the Jnanpith, in 1981. She died in Delhi in 2005.
