Amrita Pritam was born at Gujranwala in 1919, published her first collection at sixteen, and moved to Delhi in 1947.
Aj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu, written on the train out of Lahore, addresses Waris Shah and asks him to speak from his grave because a hundred thousand daughters are weeping. It is the poem of Partition in both Punjabs and it is read on both sides of the border.
Pinjar, 1950, follows Puro, a Hindu woman abducted before Partition, and refuses every consoling ending available to it. It is the most direct treatment of the abduction and recovery of women written by anyone at the time.
She won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1956, the first woman to do so, and the Jnanpith in 1982.
Her personal life, her marriage, her relationship with Sahir Ludhianvi and her long partnership with Imroz, was conducted publicly in a society that did not permit it, and she wrote about it, which is a separate kind of courage from the political kind.
She edited Nagmani for over thirty years and published a great many writers who had nowhere else to go.
The poem is about thirty lines and it is addressed to a man dead since 1798. It works because it describes nothing that happened. It asks somebody who had already written the definitive Punjabi account of one woman's ruin to come back and write it again at a different scale.
Raseedi Ticket, the autobiography, takes its title from Khushwant Singh's remark that her life would fit on the back of a revenue stamp. She used the insult as the title, which is most of what needs saying about her.
She lived in Delhi from 1947 until she died in 2005 and never lived in Punjab again. The poet of the division spent fifty eight years in a city on neither side of it, which is the ordinary condition of Punjabi writing after that year.