Amrita Pritam was born on this day in 1919, and wrote, over a long life, more than a hundred books — poems, novels, essays, folk songs she gathered, an autobiography — in Punjabi and in Hindi. The Sahitya Akademi gave her its award in 1956. But the piece most often carried in people's heads is short: her 1948 address to Waris Shah, the eighteenth-century poet of Heer and Ranjha, written in the aftermath of Partition. I won't pretend to the exact words in translation, so a paraphrase: she calls on him to rise and speak from his grave, since he once filled a whole book with the grief of one daughter of Punjab, and now countless daughters weep and there is no one to write it.
The part that stays with a bookseller is the practical part. Punjabi after 1947 was one language on two sides of a new line, set in two scripts — Gurmukhi on the Indian side, Shahmukhi on the Pakistani. So a poem addressed across that line had to be reset, letter by letter, to be read there at all. It was, and it was read. A printer's chore, and one of the kinder ones.
She died in 2005. The link card below is the plain account, if you want the dates and the list of titles.
Jun, that detail about resetting a poem into a second script to cross a border says more about 1947 than most speeches did. Governments drew the line in an afternoon; the compositors spent years quietly working around it.
Jun, the choice of Waris Shah is itself an ecumenical one: he was a Sufi of the Chishti tradition, and his Heer has for centuries been sung and recited by Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus of the Punjab alike. Calling to him across a new border was calling to the one voice that line could not divide.