International Women's Day | Amrita Pritam and Asma Jahangir: The fabulous Senoritas of South Asia | In pics

Amrita Pritam

"Will you visit Amrita, the one who wrote that poem on Waris Shah?"

In 1980, a Pakistani friend who was visiting legendary Indian poet and novelist Amrita Pritam in New Delhi was asked so by a Banana seller. By Waris Shah, the hawker was referring to Amrita's elegy to the 18th-century Punjabi poet that reflected a broken region's anguish over massacres during British India's partition into present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

When that friend of Amrita Pritam's nodded, he was given some Bananas by that hawker. "I can only give these. Please give them to Amrita. If she accepts them, for me my hajj will be half accomplished," the hawker said.

Years later, Amrita Pritam recounted the incidence in an interview as her throat went heavy and the Pinjar writer struggled to control her tears in reaction to the motionless love she received from the people of subcontinent throughout her life.

Amrita Pritam is not only credited to have ushered in a new era of twentieth century poetry, she is also acclaimed to have embodied that era altogether. To writer Manzoor Ejaz, she was the "prophetess of modern Punjabi literature". For conservatives of the time, she was a symbol of society's "moral breakdown", given the fiercely feminist assertion of her writings that left an indelible mark on feminist waves of the twentieth century.

Asma Jahangir

One of the 'Nine Lives of Pakistan' depicted by journalist Declan Walsh in his landmark book by the same name consists of 'The Fabulous Senorita', a chapter dedicated to Pakistani human rights activist Asma Jahangir, after a 1952 film which Jahangir watched frequently as a child.

"In a country famed for its anti-heroes, reckless nuclear proliferators, hawkish generals, thieving politicians and world class terrorists — she was that rare individual: a cast-iron idealist," Walsh wrote 

In an incredibly orthodox society like Pakistan, Jahangir defended Christians accused of 'blasphemy'— an apparent act of bringing disrepute to religion by words or deeds, considered a crime punishable by death by Islamabad. Jahangir embraced the 'untouchables' of Pakistani society and advocated the unthinkable as she kept on leading crusades to reform Pakistan's bigoted laws while calling to protect country's most persecuted minorities. 

She publicly confronted Pakistan's most powerful men — the senior generals she accused of pushing the country towards ruin with their strategic double games. 'Useless duffers', she once called them on television, bringing a spree of assassination attempts towards herself, none of which ever became successful. 

Considered one of Amrita Pritam's best works, Pinjar (1950) delves upon the destruction of British India's partition into present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Pritam writes about deaths, abductions and sexual assaults that went on unabated across the newly formed international border in 1947. As flagbearer of criminal assertion of patriarchy during moments of crisis, Pinjar navigates the notions of 'family honour', women's authority over their own bodies amid haunting descriptions of brutality against women.

The book was adapted into a film by the same name in 2003 by director Chandraprakash Dwivedi, starring Manoj Bajpayee and Urmila Matondkar. The film  won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film on National Integration and Special Jury Award for Bajpayee.

After a loveless marriage at a young age, Amrita Pritam dared to love, while going on to assert an irredeemable authority over herself, denying traditional male-centric impositions their say in her life. She first fell in love with lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi, and artist Imroz later. While her love with Ludhianvi couldn't really accomplish its zenith, she spent the rest of her life living-in with artist Imroz. 

Amrita Pritam wrote a poem 'Shaam ka Phool' (The evening flower), depicting how she felt for 10 years younger Imroz, and that she met her a bit late in her life. 

Trapped in a loveless marriage at a young age, Amrita Pritam dared to love – lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi at first, and artist Imroz later. While her first love remained unfulfilled, she spent the rest of her life living-in with a rather loving and caring Imroz.

Amrita was married to a cloth merchant of Lahore (now in Pakistan). She moved to Delhi with her family after Partition. After her divorce in 1960, her work became more feminist. Many of her stories and poems drew on the unhappy experience of her marriage.

To India's Instagram generation, Amrita Pritam represents a literary figure whose timeless lines on love and longing for love after its loss they have come to relate with. To the ones before them, Pritam's contemporaries, the descriptions vary. 

Pritam's magnum opus, a long poem, Sunehade won her the 1956 Sahitya Akademi Award, making her the first and the only woman to have been given the award for a work in Punjabi.

She later received the Bharatiya Jnanpith, one of India's highest literary awards in 1982 for Kagaz Te Canvas ("The Paper and the Canvas").

She was honoured with Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian honour in 2004. 

The same year, she was honoured with India's highest literary award as one of the "immortals of literature" for lifetime achievement.

Pakistani Human Rights activist Asma Jahangir often cited Mahatma Gandhi's writings and opted his principles of non-violence while protesting for the rights of most persecuted. In this picture, as chairperson of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) Jahangir The Mahatma Gandhi Ashram in Ahmedabad on March 9, 2008.

Jahangir who was also the United Nation Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on extra judicial, summary or arbitrary executions met the Chief Minister Narendra Modi of the Indian state of Gujarat during her visit to India.

Jahangir spent her life defending the human and women's rights, rights of religious minorities and children in Pakistan. She was a staunch critic of the Hudood Ordinance and blasphemy laws of Pakistan put in place as part of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq's Islamisation program in the late 1970s. 

Jahangir campaigned against human rights abuses taking place in government and police custody in Pakistan. In a letter published in 1995, she said that "Women are arrested, raped and sexually assaulted every day in the presence of female constables, who find themselves helpless in such situations". Jahangir vowed to be the voice of Pakistani women facing the wrath of draconian laws of the country. 

Asma Jahangir succumbed to a stroke leading to brain hemorrhage in Lahore on 11 February, 2018 at the age of 66. Thousands walked in to pay their last tributes to Jahangir at Lahore's Gaddafi Stadium. Unlike most Pakistani public spaces, one could see as many women as men. At times, women shouldered Asma's casket. Men and women prayed together, shoulder to shoulder, making it Asma’s last subversive act.