The mystic as muse

Poet Amrita Pritam said it in verse, Ajj Aakhan Wris Shah Nun, Pakistani theatre director Madeeha Gauhar and Shahid Nadeem saluted them through a play, Bulha, and now, fashion designer-publisher Muzaffar Ali pays tribute to the Sufi poet saints through a coffee table book called The Sufis of the Punjab. The book, launched in Delhi a few days ago, traces the tradition of Sufism and its impact on drama, literature, architecture and other works of art.

Poet Nirupama Dutt has written about how artists like Arpana Caur and Satish Gujral have imaged the love legends of Punjab, penned in poetry by Sufis such as Waris Shah who immortalised Heer-Ranjha. Another interesting insight by Dutt is into the Sufi architecture of the state. Several poets, authors, academicians, researchers and painters, from India and Pakistan, have contributed to the book, presenting an overview of how Sufism continues to influence the cultural, literary, artistic and spiritual tradition of the Punjab. The pages are replete with paintings, sketches, couplets in Urdu (with English translations), photographs and calligraphy.

Full report here Indian Express

Birth anniversary of Amrita Pritam

Amrita Pritam was born in 1919 into a Sikh family in Gujranwala, Punjab, (today in Pakistan) as the only child of a schoolteacher and a poet. Her mother died when she was eleven. 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, when the former British India was partitioned into the independent states of India and Pakistan, she moved to New Delhi, where she began to write in Hindi as opposed to Punjabi, her mother tongue.

Communal violence that followed the partition in 1947, saddened her as it did many. She explored and wrote extensively about that human dilemma. She worked until 1961 for All India Radio. She was divorced in 1960, and following that her work became 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 from Punjabi, including her autobiographical works Black Rose and Revenue Stamp. Her novel Pinjar (Skeleton) was made into a Hindi movie by the same name, which released in 2003. Pinjar is set against the backdrop of the violent frenzy and rioting that engulfed the whole of Punjab in the months preceding partition.

Pritam often wrote on the condition of Indian women and her writings reflected their neglect and suppression in Indian society. She was awarded the Jnanpith, India’s highest literary award, in 1981 for Kagaj te Canvas (Paper and Canvas).

Full report here Hindustan Times