Quote by Amrita Pritam: “Today I call to Waris Shah: speak up from your grave.”

Pritam calls on a long-dead poet to bear witness to unspeakable suffering. The idea is that what happened during Partition was so horrific that only the poet who once captured the greatest love tragedy of Punjab could find words for it. It is a cry for literature to meet catastrophe.

Pritam wrote this poem immediately after the Partition of British India in 1947, one of the largest forced migrations in human history. Hundreds of thousands were killed and millions displaced as Punjab was divided between India and Pakistan, with particular violence inflicted on women.

Celebrated Punjabi poet and novelist, born in 1919, and the first woman to receive the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1956. Her poetry and fiction explored love, partition, and female desire with radical honesty, and her lifelong relationship with poet Sahir Ludhianvi became the stuff of literary legend.