“... SHE WAS NOT A LOUD FEMINIST, SHE ESTABLISHED HERSELF AS A WOMAN WRITER IN THE MALEDOMINATED LITERARY WORLD”
Main chup, shant aur adol khadi thi. Sirf paas behte samundra mein toofan tha,
Phir samundra ko khuda jaane, Kya khyaal aaya?
Usne toofan ki ek potli-si baandhi.
Mere haathon mein thamaayi,
Aur hans kar kuch door ho gaya” That’s from Ek Mulakaat, by Amrita Pritam, the first woman to win a Sahitya Akademi award, in 1956.
She wrote novels and verse that ached with the anguish of Partition. It is said her heart never left Lahore. That city gave her her first published book, a collection of poetry called Amrit Lehran. Her first husband, a businessman named Pritam Singh, whom she would divorce 25 years later. And her one true love, the poet Sahir Ludhianvi.
She never had a romantic relationship with Ludhianvi. But she did have one with the artist Imroze. Theirs was a love that would last 41 years, until her death in 2005. She was 86. In Delhi, she built a life and cemented her identity as a rebel. But in all those years, Amrita Pritam never visited Lahore again.
Ashapurna Devi (1909 –1995), the first Indian woman to be awarded the Jnanpith Award for her book Protham Protishruti (The First Commitment) in 1976 belonged to the generation in between two of the greats of Bengali literature – Saratchandra Chattopadhyay and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay. Ashapurna Devi captured an urban milieu whereas Saratchandra mainly portrayed the village world or the semi-urban world; Tarashankar injected romance in the literature of realism. Devi’s prose was modern and in colloquial Bengali which was a new trend for her age. “Ashapurna Devi was not a loud feminist, she eked out the role of a woman writer in the nearly maledominated world of Bengali literature,” says Sunandan Roy Chowdhury, editor and publisher, Sampark. “She found a warm response among female and male readers. She was a female Saratchandra, and in some ways, even better.”
Separated by many generations and milieu from Ashapurna Devi, Arundhati Roy became the first Indian woman to win the Booker prize in 1996 for her debut novel, The God of Small Things. The multi-generation family story built around twins, Rahel and Estha, captures the many facets of life in Kerala – its politics, caste system and the Syrian Christian way of life. Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times critic, in an article, writes: “She proves remarkably adept at infusing her story with the inexorable momentum of tragedy. She [Roy] writes near the beginning of the novel that in India, personal despair “could never be desperate enough,’’ that “it was never important enough’’ because “worse things had happened’’ and “kept happening.’’”