Who Was Amrita Pritam? Let’s See Her Biography To Understan It.

Amrita Pritam was born Amrit Kaur in 1919 in the modern-day district of Mandi Bahauddin, Punjab, in British India, to a Khatri Sikh family. She was the only child of Raj Bibi, a schoolteacher, and Kartar Singh Hitkari, a poet, Braj Bhasha scholar, and literary journal editor. Aside from that, he was a Pracharak (Sikh preacher). Amrita's mother died when she was eleven. Soon after, she and her father went to Lahore, where she was still until 1947 when she migrated to India.

She began writing at a young age, faced with adult duties and loneliness after her mother died. Her first collection of poems, Amrit Lehran ("Immortal Waves"), was published in 1936 when she was sixteen years old, and she married Pritam Singh, an editor with whom she had been involved since childhood, and changed her name from Amrit Kaur to Amrita Pritam. Between 1936 and 1943, a half-dozen poetry volumes appeared.

Though she began as a romantic poet, she quickly altered gears and joined the Progressive Writers Movement. The result was visible in her collection, Lok Peed ("People's Anguish", 1944), which strongly criticized the war-torn economy during the Bengal famine of 1943.

She was also active in social work to some level and actively participated in such activities after Independence, when social activist Guru Radha Kishan took the initiative to establish the first Janta Library in Delhi. Balraj Sahni and Aruna Asaf Ali inaugurated the event, to which she also contributed. This study center/library is still open at the Clock Tower in Delhi. She also spent some time working at a radio station in Lahore before India's split.

Amrita was the first winner of the Punjab Rattan Award, bestowed upon her by Punjab Chief Minister Capt. Amarinder Singh. Amrita Pritam was the first female recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1956 for Sunehadey (poetic diminutive of the Punjabi word "ਸੁਨੇਹੇ" (Sunehe), Messages). In 1982, she earned the Bhartiya Jananpith Award, India's highest literary award, for Kagaj te Canvas. She won the Padma Shri (1969) and Padma Vibhushan (2004), India's second-highest civilian awards, as well as the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship, India's highest literary award, in 2004. She got D.Litt. honorary degrees from numerous universities, including Delhi University (1973), Jabalpur University (1973), and Vishwa Bharati (1987).

She also earned the international Vaptsarov Award from the Republic of Bulgaria in 1979 and the French Government's Degree of Officer Dens, Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Officier) in 1987. She was nominated as a Rajya Sabha member from 1986 to 1992. Towards the end of her life, she was awarded by Pakistan's Punjabi Academy, to which she replied, Bade dino baad mere Maike ko meri Yaad aayi.. (My motherland has remembered me after a long time); and Punjabi poets of Pakistan sent her a chaddar from the tombs of Waris Shah and fellow Sufi mystic poets Bulle Shah and Sultan Bahu.

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