He would visit her in Lahore and leave after hours of silent smoking. With Sahir, every psychic ache was also a physical memory and poetic impasse. This then is the second lesson: Love does not need volume or details, it is epic not in span but in fervour. Pritam’s sculpting of specific life moments as short vignettes seems to demonstrate that surface area matters less than depth – stamps have as much to say as epics. But the relationship would not see fruition despite years of longing and Khushwant Singh, at that time her confidante (and translator), told her in disappointment (this is his version, not hers) that her sparse love story (with Sahir) could be written on a raseedi tikat (revenue stamp) – years later, she appropriated his sarcasm for the title of her autobiography – The Revenue Stamp. The book of poems, Sunehre that she wrote for Sahir won the Akademi Award in 1957. I was worn out by the effort…” The aftershock of love could only be contained by writing, and even then, barely. “It was like leaping into the flames every day. When the love did manifest, she tells us, it took the form of the poet Sahir Ludhianvi.
She writes of a love affair with “a deep dark shadow” that was layered with “the face of my ideal lover, and mine” – it is this shadow that she claims to have inspired whatever she wrote, “to which I gave flesh and blood, a vague mass in which I sought to reveal something luminous in quality.” This then is the first lesson: One has to believe in love to deserve it, to manifest it. Her initial creative output seems to have emerged from this need to make sense of a world where she must have felt almost without agency. Born in Punjab, in present-day Pakistan, her early years were tumultuous – she was engaged at the age of four, lost her mother at eleven, and was married at sixteen. Love precedes the belovedĪmrita Pritam, who would have turned a hundred this year, led a life that was unconventional in many ways, and devoted entirely to writing. This is therefore an attempt to read her autobiography as she has written it – in fragments – and through the prism of her musings on love. The last thing love should do, Amrita Pritam seems to suggest, is be self-righteous or preach. This revelation is not about explicitness in the mode of the “confessional poets” (say, Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton), for that would breach an intimacy that Amrita Pritam’s words seek to cocoon and nourish, but the writing is candid and inviting in a way that turns the voyeur in the reader to an ally, a fellow-sojourner on the path of love. More importantly, the translucence of her narratorial voice, even while it is as iceberg as Hemingway would like (the bulk of the telling in suggestion or ellipsis), reminds us of what it takes, especially for a woman in India, to be utterly unapologetic about her choices in love. The impression of an unrevised manuscript prevails on a second, and then on a third reading as well, which is when one begins to rethink: Could this be design and not impatience? When Amrita Pritam writes about love, is she also demonstrating the many ways in which we love? Was her writing an invitation to embrace the heart and its truant ways? The memories are loosely gathered, written in trailing fragments, more like scattered diary entries or mutterings to oneself, the earliest in 1930 and the latest in 1984, with no concrete narrative strand or device to span the years or the memories. Bhagat Singh Thind: The soldier whose fight for US citizenship reverberated for decadesĪt first reading, Amrita Pritam’s autobiography The Revenue Stamp ( Raseedi Tikat, 1976) seems like a manuscript that was rushed to the press before the author had a chance to revise and edit.
#AMRITA PRITAM RASIDI TICKET PDF TV#
The ban on hand-holding and hugging on TV is more proof Imran Khan’s government wants to be Zia 2.0.Watch: Man builds Taj Mahal-like home for wife in Burhanpur, Madhya Pradesh.I looked closely at two famous portraits of Tipu Sultan – and found that one isn’t actually of him.Readers’ comments: Demonetisation was like burning down an entire house to frighten a mouse away.Why India’s private sector wants to give booster shots – and what this reveals about flawed policy.Moon’s surface has enough oxygen to sustain 800 crore humans for 1 lakh years – but there’s a catch.33% of Muslims experienced religious discrimination in hospitals, finds Oxfam India survey.Chinese-Indians from Deoli Camp write to Modi again urging India to apologise for 1962 internment.Christophe Jaffrelot on the way Hindutva is changing history and science textbooks in schools.Five retail innovations in China that can change the way the world shops.Covid-19 cases are declining in India – but not because of vaccinations alone.