They moved to Lahore after this tragedy, and she would live there until 1947 when she migrated to India during Partition. Being uprooted from her childhood home, and growing up in a strange city without a mother and with a busy father made her self-reliant. She took refuge in the collection of books in her father’s library. This early withdrawal into the world of words saw her write and publish her first anthology of poems, Amrit Lehran, when she was barely 16. Her father would have preferred her to write religious poetry, but Amrita was fiercely individualistic and she wrote what she pleased and in a language she was comfortable in, namely Punjabi. She had grown now, from the young girl of 11 who’d been bereft when her mother passed away, to a self-contained young woman of 16. This was the year she got married to Pritam Singh, a boy she had been engaged to since she was barely four, as was the custom of the day. While she was not happy about getting married, she did not resist it either. She had now, as Emily Dickinson famously wrote, laid down the playthings of childhood and stepped into the role of wife and mother. She would follow her first book of poems with over six collections of poems published between 1936 and 1943. She would read out her poems on the radio, something her husband wasn’t too happy about. He told her he would pay her the money she earned as a radio announcer in Lahore, an offer she turned down. She wasn’t doing it for the money. What was important to her was the adulation and direct connection with her listeners. While she began as a romantic poet, she would shift her ideologies to socialism and become part of the Progressive Writers’ Movement. The result of this shift in affiliation would reflect in her collection, Lok Peed, in 1944, which took a hard look at the misery of the poor post Second World War and the horrors of the Bengal famine of 1943.
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