It is Punjabi author and poet, Amrita Pritam's 100th birth anniversary and Google has honoured her with a doodle. The author, most noted for her novel Pinjar, which was made into a Bollywood film, has also penned the poignant poem, Ajj aakhaan Waris Shah nu (Today I invoke Waris Shah — An Ode to Waris Shah). The poem is about the 1947 massacres that took place during the partition in Punjab.
Pinjar too, is a book set in the backdrop of partition, which is about a woman who is kidnapped by a Muslim man and finds herself on the wrong side of the border post-partition. Pritam also wrote in Urdu. In the doodle, she is seen sitting in front of black roses, writing. Black roses are symbolic to the title of her biography, Kala Gulab (black rose).
She was honoured with the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1956. She was the first woman to be honoured with it. In 1980, she received Bulgaria's Vaptsarov Prize for literature. Her last creation is a novel titled 49 Days. She once famously said, “While I write, I don't care about the reader.”
