Amrita Pritam: Grooves of My Soul
A Poet Readers Adopt
Some writers are admired from a distance. Amrita Pritam gets taken home. Born in 1919, she is often called the first major woman poet and novelist of Punjabi literature, and a personal essay titled “She Writes on The Grooves of My Soul” shows how readers treat her: less like a figure on a syllabus, more like a relative who has always been around.
Reading Her Through Family
The essay’s author links Pritam to Lahore, the city her own father came from, and to the Punjab of the five rivers. Pritam turns up in small, private scenes, like a bride being dressed in red while the elders smile. The author reads Pritam’s wedding-song poems as gentle warnings that a young bride has no idea what is coming, whatever sweets are placed in her lap. For this reader, the poems are something handed down, like a family recipe.
Loss and Partition
Pritam was born in Gujranwala and lost her mother when she was still a child. Her first book of poems came out when she was sixteen. In 1947 Partition made her a refugee, and she left Lahore for Delhi at twenty-eight. Out of that grief came “Ajj Aakhan Waris Shah Nu,” in which she calls on the old poet Waris Shah to get up from his grave and look at what had happened to Punjab. It is still the poem most people know her for.
A Life Lived Her Way
Pritam’s marriage ended, and she never hid her long attachment to the poet Sahir Ludhianvi, which stayed mostly unspoken. Her last four decades were spent with the artist Imroz, who designed her book covers and painted her many times. She wrote about all of this plainly in her autobiography Rasidi Ticket. For a woman writing in her time, that took nerve.
The Wider Work
She wrote more than a hundred books, including poems, novels, essays, biographies and collected folk songs. Pinjar, her novel about a woman caught up in Partition’s violence, was made into an acclaimed film in 2003. Along the way she collected the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Jnanpith and the Padma Vibhushan.
Why She Still Matters
The essay closes with a simple idea: her poems can help us get through hard times if we listen to them. That holds up. Readers were still posting reviews of her books this January, and the subjects she cared about have not gone out of date. She wrote about leaving home, about what women carry quietly, and about love that doesn’t fit the usual labels. If you’re feeling the weight of memory or longing in 2026, her lines are a good place to sit for a while.
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