Paper short abstract:

This paper is going to examine autobiographical writings of contemporary Punjabi writer, Dalip Kaur Tiwana, with some references to autobiographies of other Punjabi women writers of the same generation such as Amrita Pritam and Ajeet Kaur.

Paper long abstract:

Contemporary Punjabi literature and its practitioners have a special affinity with autobiography and most probably the number of akin autobiographies in Punjabi, especially literary autobiographies by popular writers, exceeds by leaps and bounds sum of autobiographies in any other modern Indian language. Dalip Kaur Tiwana (b. 1935), an extremely prolific and popular Punjabi writer, and the subject of this paper, is similarly an author of a number of autobiographies written and published over time and dealing with different periods of her life. Like other female Punjabi writers of her time, for example Amrita Pritam (1919-2005) and Ajeet Kaur (b.1935), she too approaches her life-story in a very literary manner, working and reworking the material with an aim to present a consistent and unitary portrayal of the self, a self that pleases her enough to be projected like a protagonist of a novel. Literary strategies employed in Dalip Kaur Tiwana's autobiographies often thus mirror strategies employed in her fiction, and the presentation of these strategies is going to be the subject matter of this paper.