Romy Gill on poet Amrita Pritam

Great Lives

BBC

History, Documentary, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 6 September 2022

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Chef Romy Gill remembers her Mother reading Amrita Pritam's poems to her when she was growing up. Romy was drawn to Amrita's fierce independent spirit and began to learn about her importance as a Panjabi writer whose work was heavily influenced by Partition, and in particular the experiences of women during this period. Romy's joined by the poet Rupinder Kaur who performs extracts of Amrita's work and says her work and influence still resonates today. Amrita Pritam's own voice is heard, speaking about the train journey she took after Partition when she and her family fled to safety in Delhi, inspiring her most famous work 'Ajj Akhan Waris Shah Nu'. Produced for BBC Audio in Bristol by Toby Field

Transcript

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0:36.9	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:54.2	Gosh, that's beautiful and I can't even understand what it means.
0:58.6	It just sounds lovely and it's a bit of first that was written by the subject of today's
1:04.4	great lives.
1:06.2	And they've been chosen by my guest, the chef and food writer, Romy Gill.
1:11.1	Romy, tell me who wrote that and a little bit about why you've chosen this person.
1:16.4	I have chosen Amrita Pritam who was a novelist, a poet who wrote in Punjabi and Hindi.
1:23.5	She was born in 1919.
1:25.6	I grew up in India and I was very fascinated with Amrita Pritam as a very little girl because
1:31.0	my mom used to read poetry and novels and she used to read that to us and she wrote this
1:38.4	first poetry when the partition of India and Pakistan happened in 1947 and how what happened
1:46.5	because she experienced what happened at that time and she wrote this beautiful poem to a
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