Amrita Pritam’s two Delhis: The city she lived in and the city she wrote

I have spent the better part of a decade reading and rereading Amrita Pritam in Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu. Every once in a while, I translate her into English, as a way of staying close to her. Beyond the poem written on a train during Partition, the marriage she left, the half-smoked cigarettes of half-requited love, the 40 unwed years spent flouting mid-century convention, I have come to find two Delhis: the city she lived in and the city she wrote.

Pritam arrived in Delhi in 1947 and remained there until she died in it in 2005. She had a working relationship with the city – an announcer’s job, a daily commute, a house paid for, in effect, by 33 years of editorial labour – and a separate, far less forgiving relationship with it as a subject. These two Delhis rarely appeared in the same paragraph of her own writing. It is worth asking why, and what happened on the one occasion they finally did.

The Delhi she inhabited

She arrived from Lahore via Dehradun at 28, taking a job as an announcer in All India Radio’s Punjabi service, a post she held until 1961. There, she met Imroz, a young illustrator working for...

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