A Critical Study of Amrita Pritam’s Writings: Her Sensitivity towards Social Norms during Indo-Pak Partition Holocaust
Author : Dr. Jayshree Singh and Dr. Bhumika Thakur
Abstract :
Amrita Pritam, the living legend in the Indian Literature in Translation, belonged to Lahore and in post-independent India she belonged to Punjab India. Most of the contemporary novelists of her times from nook and corner of Indian Peninsula convey meanings and messages in relation to cultural baggage, cultural identity, and cultural difference. Amrita as the first modernist writer in Indian Literature who insert life into literature which signifies her being an outsider within her own world. As a female novelist too in gender-biased Indian society she struggled with the conventional norms of society and the women characters become her way of expressing her concern of her conscience regarding the prevailing norms and her viewpoint upon the general public opinion during her time. Women characters in her works are autobiographical agents who share something in common with the novelist’s journey of life and her point of view towards custom-based practices. Amrita Pritam does not simply write about women who got injured and then resurged. The themes of her novels provide deeper meaning to the embodied women’s body.
The study in this paper will take up analysis from the point of feminine subjectivity as well as in context of specific gender victimization, abduction, rape, and violence to fulfil communal-patriarchal ambitions to rule over or ravage the territory, women, and common mass during Indo-Pak Partition Holocaust just after post-independence of both India and Pakistan. The study is an attempt to bring out binary within oneself that is to die or to live; to realise the pain and find precarity or to continue with the self-anguish in one’s self-reflection; to repeat the same that one has undergone over the other or to be a phoenix to resurge after a living trauma, shame, and internal death of one’s thinking capacity. The structure of the film Pinjar (2003) that is adapted from the translated version of the novel “Pinjar” (1950) in Punjabi language, titled “Skeleton and That Man” (1992)-surfaces two aspects of the women characters-first to attain or regain the path of respect and self-dignity in an unknown house or place or in a different communal society; second the inner desire that constantly play with struggles without knowing the outcome and without thinking of any expectations.
Keywords :
Holocaust, partition, communal society, thinking capacity, resurge
