Garam Hawa fame, MS Sathyu’s Amrita – A Sublime Love Story is a play written by Danish Iqbal which tells you love is not for the faint hearted and more importantly some of the gifted and celebrated more often than not live a life where their desires have to take a back seat, foremost of them is love.
Amrita is a play that you will want to watch over and over again for the sheer brilliance of Dr Lavlin Thadani and her flair on dialogue delivery and sheer child like demeanour. Having known Imroz and Amrita Pritam personally she is able to live the character with utmost perfection.
The play by sheer word craft tries to map the life of Amrita Pritam and her much talked about love for the celebrated Sahir Ludhianvi. The letters exchanged, the cigarettes smoked secretly, the whiskey sipped and more importantly the words of pathos that turned into celebrated literature over her fascination for Sahir. It is a cleverly crafted play that keeps you gripped till the end.
While it does bring out how apart from Sahir there are those in her life as Sajjad and Imroz, it does clearly bring out the eccentricities of Sahir well who despite being a wordsmith could neither admit his love for Amrita, neither could he let her go from his life. All this till one day news came in that Sahir had left the world for better and more peaceful world in his death.
A 100 minute play it is a tribute to Padma Vibhushan, Amrita Pritam which apart from the personal life of Amrita, does highlight the impact partition had on her.
Dr Thadani has a personal connect with Amrita who lived life on her own terms without any kind of confrontation. The play sketches a brilliant image of Amrita with acting peppered with poetry and letters, who was a synonym for ‘freedom’ of an individual.
It does bring into focus the perpetual mystic love of Amrita Pritam for Sahir Ludhianvi, poet and Hindi film lyricist, as well as her feelings for her husband Pritam, and her later partner, Imroze.
The play brings to life the characters of Amrita, Sahir, their friend Sajjad, and Imroz, with the character of Pritam being referred to in absentia.
Dr Lavlin Thadani playing the lead is a sensitive poet, filmmaker, photographer, teacher and a social activist. Her work as a filmmaker has been well recorded both nationally and internationally. She has played the lead in Sathyu’s films like Sukha and is a product of FTII Pune.
The play has been staged in several parts of the country including Delhi, Gurgaon (Haryana), Indore, Patiala, Chandigarh, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Mumbai among others.
“Amrita, A Sublime Love Story”, produced by K K Kohli was staged by Impresario Asia, a troupe from New Delhi.
Amrita In 1935, married Pritam Singh, son of a leading hosiery merchant of Lahore’s Anarkali bazaar. In 1960, Amrita left him for poet Sahir Ludhianvi (Abdul Hayee). When Sahir found love in another woman, Amrita found solace in the companionship of renowned artist and writer Imroz. She spent last forty years of her life with Imroz.
The friendship and the moments between Sahir, Sajjad and Harkishan also evoked a lot of smiles.
Born as Amrita Kaur, a Punjabi writer and a leading 20th-century poet, she is considered the first prominent woman Punjabi poet, novelist, and essayist, loved both in India and Pakistan.
Most remembered for her poem, Aj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu, an elegy to the 18th-century Punjabi poet. As a novelist her most noted work was Pinjar (The Skeleton) (1950) which was later made into an award winning film.
It was in 1956 that she became the first woman to win the Sahitya Akademi Award for her magnum opus, a long poem, Sunehe (Messages). She later received the Bhartiya Jnanpith award, India’s highest literary awards, in 1982 for Kagaz Te Canvas (The Paper and the Canvas).
A recipient of the Padma Shri in 1969 and finally, Padma Vibhushan, India’s second highest civilian award, in 2004she also has a fellowship from Sahitya Akademi counted among “immortals of literature” for lifetime achievement.
She was the only child of a school teacher, a poet and a scholar of Braj Bhasha, Kartar Singh Hitkari, who also edited a literary journal.
Amrita’s mother died when she was eleven. Her first anthology of poems, Amrit Lehran (Immortal Waves) was published in 1936, at age sixteen.
In her career spanning over six decades, she penned 28 novels, 18 anthologies of prose, five short stories and 16 miscellaneous prose volumes.
She died in her sleep on 31 October 2005 at the age of 86 in New Delhi, after a long illness. She was survived by Imroz, daughter Kandlla, son Navraj Kwatra, daughter-in-law Alka, and her grandchildren, Taurus, Noor, Aman and Shilpi. Navraj Kwatra was killed in 2012.
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