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Reading UmaTrilok’s Amrita-Imroz: A Lobe Story in translation by Dilwar Hassan, Ali Ahmed writes about the life and works of Amrita Pritam, an award-winning writer and poet

UMA Trilok, although of Indian Punjabi origin, writes in Hindi and English. Her book under review, Amrita-Imroz: A Love Story (2006), is written in English and deals with a real-life love affair between two very widely-known Punjabi intellectuals, namely the famous Indian Academy award-winning writer and poet, Amrita Pritam, and the painter of the same background, Imroz, originally named Inderjit — what in Bengali would be Indrajit — who came a little late in the life of Amrita. He was nearly seven years younger than her. Amrita had, before that, been married to one businessman, Pritam Singh, of Lahore, and hence became known as Amrita Pritam in literary and cultural circles. She found the marriage unworkable after the couple had two sons, divorced her husband, and never married again until she died in 2005. But she had had more than a couple of love affairs, including with the famous Shahir Ludhianvi, a poet and lyricist. The last of the lovers was Imroz, and it lasted, very passionately, for more than four decades until she died. But what makes it very interesting is that they lived together without ever going through the almost universal ritual of marriage and continued to remain true and devotedly faithful to each other. But we will touch upon it a little later.

The Bengali translator of the book, Dilwar Hassan, is, in his own rights, a very accomplished translator, writer, and journalist and is quite well-known in the literary circles in Bangladesh and in the extended community of Bengali readers. He seems to have done the required justice to the original and to the readers as well, like the writer of this piece. They would surely get the taste of a true literary production. The language used in translation is not just accurate and proper, but crisp and often very poetic, where needed. His translation of various pieces of poetry, as could only be expected while introducing a poet of another language, comes quite alive and vibrant in translation. They felt like poems in the original, although most of those pieces were written either by Amrita or by Imroz in Hindi, Punjabi, and sometimes Urdu, too.

The present writer, a precocious reader, had an early, too early, I must say, exposure while at school in his very early teens, through Bengali translations, to Amrita Pritam’s short stories, a couple of them, at best, published in the long-defunct Bengali monthly journal called, in Persian style, Mahe Nou, edited by the deceased poet Abdul Kadir. I did not, I must confess, understand much of what I had then read but had a vague remembrance of the writer in a separate evaluation of her works, being accused of obscenity in her writings. But my lack of knowledge of Hindi and Urdu, mainly, stood in the way of my first-hand reading of the celebrated poet and writer. And her English translation, of which there have been quite a few, was also not available in Dhaka. This tempts me to guess that cases must be similar in other parts of the subcontinent, where people know very little, if anything at all, of their close linguistic neighbours’ literary activities. India, as far as I am aware, has an official programme of translating well-known books in the major languages of the country into other languages with more or less similar standing. Our main problem in Bangladesh, if I am allowed to show the audacity to say so, is an acute shortage of readership, except for some text books needed for academic purposes. This, anyway, is not the place to dwell on this theme.

I would now like to touch upon the so-called ‘obscenity’ in Amrita’s writings and her living together with her beloved Imroz without going through the ritual of marriage. I feel convinced, after going through this literary and social biographical journey of Amrita, that she was accused of obscenity, as I have alluded to, by some uninformed accusers without having any exposure to her writings. Her living together with just one beloved for a long time until her death was real, and it was not without its problems. The then Indian Punjab, now Haryana, with its majority Hindu population, or with the Sikhs of Amrita’s paternal or ancestral religion, was probably no less conservative than the other socio-religious groups in India or in other parts of the subcontinent. The case of Bangladesh, Pakistan, or other places with more pronounced religious bigotry, I think, might be different. So they had to tolerate taunts and insults, or even abuses, in different places they went, but from what I have gathered from my reading of the volume under review, no worse attempts on either or both of them are recorded. But what I find truly great about the erstwhile state of Punjab, or about the Indian federal government, and especially about the intellectual community of the country is that they continued to show great respect for Amrita as a person and a poet and writer, went so far as to bestow on her very high provincial and national honours, and also gave her the well-deserved highest literary award of the country, the Academy Award. India’s government, be it in the provinces or at the Centre, has never shown any cheekiness or any bigoted behaviour in their dealings with a great writer and poet and an intellectual of Amrita’s stature. The achievements of Amrita Pritam as a poet and a writer and the life she led, especially as a proverbially devoted lover, with Imroz were of far greater height and dignity than those of many of the orthodox couples anywhere in the world.

The writer of the book, herself quite well-known and a close family friend of Amrita and Imroz, did not, as it appears, sit down to write Amrita’s biography, or an evaluation of her place as a writer and a poet, or even to justify the courage of their conviction to break man- or tradition-made rituals of marriage, needed to live a life of utter happiness and fulfilment, but to portray an honest and respectfully loving life of an intellectually matured couple. And the writer has truly succeeded in doing that.

The translator of the rather slim volume, Dilwar Hassan, has done a great job of it all by truly transcreating the book with an enviable degree of success and has added a new dimension to our social outlook on life and living, exemplified by Amrita Pritam and the painter Imroz. We hope the book will find a large enough readership and broaden our understanding, through literature, of our close neighbours.

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Ali Ahmed is a senior retired government official.