What kind of India does Amrita Pritam still allow us to love?

On August 31, 1919, Amrit Kaur was born in Gujranwala, in the Punjab that existed before India and Pakistan. She grew up in Lahore after the death of her mother, learnt poetry and metre from her father, and began writing in Punjabi as a teenager. Decades later, after Partition forced her from Lahore to Delhi, the geography of her life had changed. The geography of her imagination had not.

That distinction may be the most important reason to return to Amrita Pritam today.

For Pritam, Punjab was never simply a place she left behind. It was a language, a memory and a cultural inheritance that could not be divided as neatly as a political map. Her Lahore, recalled through the trauma of Partition, was a city where she had once believed that Hindus would continue to live in Pakistan even after the division. The possibility that religious identity could suddenly determine who belonged where was, in her own recollections, almost unimaginable.

Then came 1947.

At 28, after leaving Lahore, Pritam wrote Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu on a train journey. She called upon Waris Shah, the 18th-century Punjabi poet and author of Heer Ranjha, asking him to rise from his grave and look again at Punjab. His famous Heer had been a story of love, separation and social barriers; Pritam transformed that vocabulary of tragic separation into a lament for a Punjab where thousands of daughters had become victims of communal violence.

That invocation was significant beyond literature. Waris Shah belonged to Punjab’s Sufi literary tradition, yet Pritam, a Sikh woman displaced into India, claimed his voice to mourn a shared homeland. The choice reflected the syncretic cultural world from which she emerged. Her own literary inheritance included the Saints, Sufis and faqirs of the Land of Five Rivers; her father was himself a spiritual poet.

Her Punjab, therefore, could not be reduced to a Hindu Punjab or a Muslim Punjab. It was the Punjab of Heer-Ranjha—a love story deeply rooted in the region’s cultural imagination, and itself carrying Sufi and Indic literary traditions across religious boundaries.

But Pritam did not romanticise Partition. She confronted its violence through women.

In Pinjar, Puro is abducted by Rashid and transformed into Hamida. Her name, religion, family and social identity become things that others can impose, erase and reconstruct. Pritam thereby shifted Partition from the familiar history of borders and political negotiations to the bodies and choices of women who were caught inside communal notions of honour.

That insistence on female agency extended into her own life. She left an unhappy marriage, wrote openly about desire and self-realisation, and lived outside conventional expectations. Her writing and life made autonomy part of her literary vocabulary at a time when women were rarely granted such freedom without moral policing.

This is why remembering Pritam today cannot be confined to Sahir, Imroz or the mythology of the romantic poet.

The more urgent question is what her imagination offers an India increasingly divided by religious identity, borders of belonging and competing claims over women’s lives.

Pritam’s answer was never a denial of faith. It was a refusal to allow faith to extinguish humanity. She could invoke a Muslim Sufi to mourn Punjab, write a Hindu woman’s suffering through the hands of a Muslim man, and still resist reducing either religion to the actions of those who weaponised it.

She left Lahore for Delhi. But she never surrendered Punjab to the border.

Perhaps that is why her most enduring romance was not with a person or even a place, but with an idea of belonging in which the other did not have to disappear for the self to exist.

And perhaps, on her birth anniversary, that leaves India with one uncomfortable, necessary question:

What kind of India does Amrita Pritam’s imagination still allow us to love?