| Amrita Pritam |
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She was born in 1919 into a Sikh family in Gujranwala , presently in Pakistan, the only child of a school teacher and a poet. Her mother died when she was eleven and she was saddled with adult responsibilities early on. She began to write at an early age, and her first collection was published when she was only sixteen years old, the year she married an editor to whom she was engaged in early childhood. She was very sad when some one million Muslim s, Hindu s and Sikhs were brutally killed in communal violence that followed the partition in 1947. She wrote extensively about that human dilemma. At the time of the partition she moved to New Delhi , where she began to write in Hindi as opposed to Punjabi, her mother tongue. She worked until 1961 for All India Radio . She was divorced in 1960 , and following that her work became more explicitly feminist, drawing on her unhappy marriage in many of her stories and poems. A number of her works have been translated into English , including her autobiographical works ''Black Rose'' and ''Revenue Stamp'' (''Raseedi Tikkat'' in Punjabi). Her novel ''Pinjar'' was made in to a Hindi Movie . She was a recipient of the Padma Vibhushan award. Amrita Pritam spent the final years of her life with a renowned artist, Imroz. She passed away on 31st October 2005 at the age of 86, after a long illness. EXTERNAL LINKS FURTHER READING ''India’s 50 Most Illustrious Women'' (ISBN 8188086193) by Indra Gupta |