Amrita Pritam – Google Doodle celebrates Punjabi writer’s 100th birthday

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates Amrita Pritam’s 100th birthday, one of history’s first most prominent female Punjabi writer, who “dared to live the life she imagines.”

Who is Amrita Pritam?

Amrita Pritam was an Indian novelist, essayist, and poet, who wrote in Punjabi and Hindi. She is viewed as the first prominent woman Punjabi poet, novelist, essayist and the leading 20th-century poet of the Punjabi language, who is similarly cherished on the two sides of the India-Pakistan border.

She was born as Amrit Kaur in Gujranwala, Punjab (present-day Pakistan). Her dad, Kartar Singh Hitkar, was a poet and scholar.

With a career spanning more than six decades, she produced more than 100 books of poetry, fiction, biographies, essays, a collection of Punjabi folk songs and an autobiography that was converted into a few Indian and foreign languages.

She is most associated with her strong poem, Ajj aakhaan Waris Shah nu (Today Iinvoke Waris Shah – “Ode to Waris Shah”), an epitaph to the 18th-century Punjabi poet, an expression of her anguish over slaughters during the partition of India. As a novelist, her most noted work was Pinjar (The Skeleton) (1950), in which she made her essential character, Puro, an embodiment of brutality against ladies, loss of humankind and extreme give up to existential destiny; the novel was made into an award-winning film, Pinjar in 2003.

At the point when previous British India was apportioned into the independent states of India and Pakistan in 1947, she moved from Lahore to India, however, she remained similarly prevalent in Pakistan for an incredible duration, when contrasted with her contemporaries like Mohan Singh and Shiv Kumar Batalvi.

Known as the most significant voice for the women in Punjabi literature, in 1956, she became the first woman to win the Sahitya Akademi Award for her magnum opus, a long poem, Sunehade (Messages), later she got the Bharatiya Jnanpith, one of India’s highest literary awards, in 1982 for Kagaz Te Canvas (The Paper and the Canvas). The Padma Shri came her way in 1969 lastly, Padma Vibhushan, India’s second-highest civilian award, in 2004, and around the same year she was honored with India’s highest literary award, given by the Sahitya Akademi (India’s Academy of Letters), the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship given to the “immortals of literature” for lifetime accomplishment.

In 2005 itself, a French interpretation of her novel, The Skeleton, was awarded the La Route des Indes Literary Prize.

Today’s Google doodle, by artist Vrinda Zaveri, carries a reference to Amrita Pritam’s autobiography ‘Kala Gulab’ (Black Rose). She has composed two different autobiographies – ‘Rasidi Ticket’, which discussions about her deep affection for poet Sahir Ludhianvi, and ‘Shadows of Words’.

In 1986, she was nominated to the Rajya Sabha. She died in 2005. In 2007, noted released an audio album, ‘Amrita recited by Gulzar’discharged a sound collection, ‘Amrita recounted by Gulzar’