Indian · 1919–2005
Amrita Pritam was born in Gujranwala, in what is now Pakistan, published her first poetry collection at sixteen, and left Lahore for Delhi in 1947. On the train out she wrote Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu, an address to the eighteenth-century Punjabi poet asking him to speak from his grave about what was being done to the women of Punjab; it is the poem Punjabis on both sides of the border know by heart. She produced roughly a hundred books of poetry, fiction, essays, and memoir in Punjabi and Hindi, and edited the literary monthly Nagmani for decades. Her novel Pinjar follows a Hindu woman abducted by a Muslim man before Partition and is one of the few accounts to keep its focus on the women who were taken and then refused by their own families. She was the first woman to win the Sahitya Akademi Award, and received the Jnanpith Award and the Padma Vibhushan.