Amrita Pritam’s Punjabi poem “Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu” is a landmark literary response to the Partition of 1947. Addressing the eighteenth-century Punjabi poet Waris Shah, remembered for his tragic love narrative Heer Ranjha, Pritam turns a predecessor into a witness to Punjab’s suffering. This article discusses the poem’s central gestures and historical force without reproducing the complete t…
Part 55 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through Indian poetry. Jibanananda Das is one of the most distinctive voices in modern Bengali poetry. His landscapes are often dreamlike, filled with rivers, fields, birds, dusk and the feeling of a past that survives in fragments. Nature in his poems is not simply scenic background; it becomes a way of thinking about time, solitude and belonging. L…
Part 51 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through Indian poetry. Balamani Amma is celebrated for Malayalam poetry that explores motherhood, tenderness, memory and the emotional complexity of family life. Her work is often associated with an intimate lyric voice, yet its domestic settings open onto larger questions about care, identity and the passage of time. Motherhood as lived experience M…
Part 44 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through Indian poetry. Toru Dutt’s poetry brings together Indian memory, English-language expression and a deep awareness of cultural translation. Though she died very young in the nineteenth century, her work helped establish an important place for Indian writers in English. Her poems often use landscape, family memory and inherited stories to explo…
Part 20 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through India’s poetic heritage. Toru Dutt’s “Our Casuarina Tree” is a deeply personal poem in which a familiar tree becomes a symbol of childhood, memory and the people who are no longer present. The poem moves from vivid description of the tree to reflections on time and loss. This article explores its imagery and emotional structure without reprod…
Part 14 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through India’s poetic heritage. Amrita Pritam’s Punjabi poem “Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu” is one of the most powerful literary responses to the violence and displacement of the 1947 Partition. The speaker addresses the eighteenth-century Punjabi poet Waris Shah, associated with the tragic love story of Heer and Ranjha, and asks him to rise and witnes…
Part 11 of The Poetry Pulse’s 100-part journey through India’s poetic heritage. A.K. Ramanujan’s “Small-Scale Reflections on a Great House” examines a family home as a place where objects, habits and relationships accumulate across generations. The poem’s house is not merely a building. It becomes a system that absorbs people and things, preserving the past while exposing the strange ways familie…
