In “Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu,” Amrita Pritam calls on the Punjabi poet associated with Heer Ranjha to rise from his grave and witness the devastation of Partition. The poem transforms Heer’s individual grief into the anguish of Punjab’s many daughters, making women’s suffering central to its account of collective loss.
What does “Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu” mean?
The title is commonly romanized as “Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu” and translated as “Today, I invoke Waris Shah” or “Today, I Say Unto Waris Shah.” Transliteration and English translations vary.
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Pritam addresses Waris Shah, the poet famed for the tragic love story of Heer and Ranjha. In the opening lines, as printed and translated by The Indian Express, she asks him to speak from his grave and turn another page in the book of love. It is a summons to a literary predecessor: a poet who wrote of love and loss is asked to look at a catastrophe on a far wider scale.
“Today, I invoke Waris Shah, speak from your grave / And turn, today, the book of love’s next page”
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This is The Indian Express’s English rendering of the Punjabi lines, not a definitive or exclusive translation.
How does the poem connect Heer’s sorrow to Partition?
Heer is one grieving daughter of Punjab in Waris Shah’s story. Pritam sets that singular sorrow against the cries of many daughters in a Punjab torn by violence. The allusion gives the poem a gendered point of view: women’s grief and vulnerability are not incidental to the account but part of its central image of what has been lost.
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The poem also makes the landscape bear witness. Images of corpses in fields and blood filling the Chenab render violence visible in the land itself. Rather than offer a complete historical record, the poem uses these images and its appeal to Waris Shah to make collective devastation felt.
What was happening when Pritam wrote it?
The Indian Express reports that Pritam was 28, had migrated to India, and wrote the poem in 1947 during a train journey. DAWN describes worsening communal violence in Lahore as the circumstances that eventually forced her to leave the city. Together, these accounts place the poem in the context of displacement and Partition violence, but they do not establish an exact composition date, route, or single definitive account of the journey.
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DAWN also reports that the poem’s opening adapts an earlier Punjabi lament. That textual-history account is reported by DAWN; it should not be confused with the poem’s better-known invocation of Waris Shah.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why has the poem endured as a Partition lament?
Gulzar, a poet who knew Pritam, called the poem representative of its time and said that hearing it could feel like hearing the whole Partition described in a few lines. The Indian Express also reports his view that it brought a woman’s point of view to a subject in which few women’s voices had been heard. These are Gulzar’s assessments, not a claim that one poem can encompass every experience of Partition.
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The poem’s focus on women’s grief matters in light of the wider silencing of women’s experiences in accounts of Partition violence. A Punjabi University journal article discusses Pritam’s Partition writing in that context. Read this poem as a literary intervention that foregrounds women’s suffering, not as a complete record or a voice that represents all women.
Pritam also recalled that the poem provoked criticism from readers who thought it should have addressed other figures, including Guru Nanak or Lenin and Stalin. In her 1976 autobiography Rasidi Ticket, as quoted by The Indian Express, she wrote that “a lot of people wrote poems against the poem.” The response underscores how pointed her choice of Waris Shah was: she called on the poet whose work had made Punjab’s love story endure to witness a new and collective sorrow.
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