Poet Amrita Pritam’s life enacted on stage

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Amrita Pritam (August 1919-October 2005), the Punjabi poet who was as well known for her emotional and humanistic poetry as for her bohemian life, was the subject of an interesting drama, Amrita, A Sublime Love Story, written by Danish Iqbal and presented by Impresario Asia and Old World Culture at the Habitat Centre.

Amrita lost her mother at the age of 11, after which she moved to Lahore with her father. Loneliness led her to writing at a very young age.
Her fist collection of poems, Amrit Lehren, was published when she was sixteen. That year, as part of her father’s commitment, Amrita was married of to Pritam Singh, a hosiery merchant in Lahore. Falling desperately in love with Urdu poet Sahir Ludhianvi, she left her husband along with her son and daughter in 1960. The play, which is culled from Amrita’s own words and writings, describes how during a press interview, she scribbled Sahir’s name all over a piece of paper.
Her passion for Sahir was boundless. “I caught myself writing Sahir on the back of Imroze’s sweater whilst travelling on his scooter”. When the relationship with Sahir did not work out—he apparently had another woman in his life — Amrita found comfort with the painter Imroze. It was this relationship that sustained Amrita for the last 40 years of her life. Saying she loves him, she writes how when he went to Mumbai on an assignment and she missed him so much that she decided to collect the ten thousand rupees he said he wanted as insurance against taking up any job ever again.”
Imroze was aware of Amrita’s passionate love for Sahir. He developed a friendship with him. In a visually attractive sequence, where Sahir is smoking by the sea side (depicted by a cyclorama on one side of the auditorium), Imroze comes looking for him and they sit on the sand drinking and reciting poetry in perfect camaraderie. Amrita was also close to Sajjad, who lived in Pakistan, an old friend whose visits were the highlights in her life.
Amrita’s most important work is an invocation to the Sufi poet, who sang the immortal tragedy Heer Ranjha, in which she begs him, who once wrote about a girl’s grief in Punjab to cast a glance at the thousands of girls who have been killed, molested and tortured during the Partition. Ajj Akhya Waris Shah nu kiton kabran vichchon bol, Tu ajj kitab-e-ishq da koi agla vakra phol ,written in Gurmukhi in 1948, is considered one of the greatest poems on Partition. Amrita was the first woman to receive the Sahitya Akademi award for her book Sunehray and also the Punjab Ratna Award. She also received the Padma Vibhushan and was made Fellow of the Sahitya Akademi. These and several other international and national awards barely find mention in the script.
Lavlin Thadani, who is a poet in her own right and shared a special bond with the poet, plays Amrita, who comes across as a perpetual
Heer in search of her Ranjha, she becomes a tragedienne, putting up a brave front. One sees little of Amrita, the woman who inspired by the progressive movement, shed her romanticism and wrote Lok Peera. Amrita’s style of speaking was peculiar in its slow and deliberate rhythm, particularly when she was reading her own poem. Lavlin gets close to the slow and deliberate but it becomes slow and monotonous.
There is a dramatic sequence designed by the director where a split Amrita faces the contradictions and conflicts in her life.
Lavlin manages to hold the play together with sheer grit and by feeding the curiosity of the public that wants to know more about a woman who leaves her husband for a poet and then settles down with a painter who is much younger than her. The male characters are present as ideas; as extensions of Amrita. Sahir(Vijay Nangyal) is the smoker whose cigarette butts she smokes after he leaves her, and hopes that the cloud of smoke from her cigarettes would reach him in the other world. (He died in 1980 at the age of 59 of alcoholism). He is also the elusive one who never gives a straightforward reply to any question she asks. Imroze (Kedar Nath) is the dependable one, someone he can lean on. Sajjad (Sanjeev Kumar) is the he dashing hero of her youth, a friend and confidante. The script unfolds through Time or Waqt enacted by Mangat Ram in his sonorous voice as he interacts with Amrita and the story moves forward or backward as they desire.
The play, directed by veteran theatre person M.S. Sathyu, who made the definitive film Garam Hawa, comes across more a tribute to Amrita Pritam than as a serious theatre effort.
He has not tried to flesh out the characters. The set is an over furnished living room where more than two characters are difficult to accommodate, putting paid to any dramatic diagonal moves. The play works because of the nostalgia around Amrita Pritam, who is important for the displaced Punjabi.

For others, she is a topic of discussion.