Amrita Pritam’s “To Waris Shah” Translation by Khushwant Singh. A Feminist Poetic Memoir of Partition Trauma of Punjab

Academic Paper from the year 2017 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, language: English, abstract: The article aims to understand how Pritam's poem "To Waris Shah" shattered the Gandhian utopia of united India by documenting how the domestic and foreign agendas of communal hatred got drawn on the bodies of women. Amrita Pritam's Punjabi poem, "To Waris Shah" ("Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu", 1948) is translated into English by Khushwant Singh in 1982. Pritam gets hailed as the modernist literary heiress of the Punjabi Sufi poet, Waris Shah. Amrita Pritam in her elegy, To Waris Shah, attempts to wake her deceased idol forcing him to listen and witness the India-Pakistan Partition of 1947 that costed the heart-breaking wails of millions of daughters like Heer, the 'daughter of Punjab'.