What is Amrita Pritam’s poem “Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu” about?

The partition of India in 1947 brought history directly into Amrita Pritam’s writing, and her best-known poem, “Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu” (1948; “Today I Call unto Waris Shah”), is perhaps one of the most popular literary responses to that catastrophic event. In the poem she invokes the 18th-century Punjabi Sufi poet Waris Shah, whose version of the Punjabi folktale Heer retells the tragic love story of Heer and Ranjha. Pritam urges Shah to rise from his grave and open a new page in his “book of love” and use his writing to give voice to the sorrow of countless daughters of Punjab, just as he once gave voice to Heer’s grief. The poem begins with the grief of Punjab’s women and shifts to Punjab’s collective suffering.