But it was an unhappy and highly turbulent union that eventually ended in divorce in 1960, rendering a strong feminist flavour to Pritam's later works.Thereafter she teamed up with Imroz, an artist based in Delhi, where she had lived since independence, and their relationship survived for over four decades. In one of her recent poems, penned from her sickbed and knowing that her end was imminent, she consoled Imroz by declaring that they would meet again.After independence, Amrita Pritam (she continued to use her married name throughout her life) joined the state-run All India Radio, and worked there for 14 years until 1961 when she left to take up writing full-time. Pritam focused on the lives of young Muslim, Sikh and Hindu women who became the victims of abduction, rape and other untold miseries during the fury of the chaos and mindless killings, in a cameo that was eventually made into a successful film in 2002.Pritam's poignant poems also publicised the plight of Punjabi women, who had woven their suffering in a conservative milieu into folksongs, sung softly behind voluminous veils and in the privacy of the kitchens to which they were perpetually doomed.She was born Amrita Kaur in Gujranwala, now in Pakistan, in 1919, the daughter of an orthodox Sikh schoolteacher and poet. Her mother died when she was only 11; the ensuing loneliness made the pretty and petite Amrita reclusive and she sought solace in poetry, publishing her first anthology in 1935 at the age of 16 in Lahore, the cultural and political capital of Punjab and the city where she lived until partition.The same year, desperately in search of emotional succour and stability, she married Pritam Singh, a Sikh journalist who was much older than her. The poem remains immortalised in the hearts of millions of Punjabis.In the novel Pinjar (1950, later translated as The Skeleton), Pritam depicts the political and human tragedy that subsumed Punjab in the months of sectarian rioting that preceded the sub-continent's partition into a Muslim Pakistan and a broadly secular, but predominantly Hindu India. In simple but delicate and creative prose and verse, she expressed the poignancy of India's division by the colonial administration in 1947, when millions were uprooted, with bloodshed and tragedy on either side of the new border. Written a few months after Partition, the opening lines of Pritam's "Ode to Waris Shah", an elegy to the 18th-century Punjabi poet - "I want Waris Shah to speak from his grave / And turn today in the Book of Love, to love's next beloved page" - capture hauntingly the essence of the moving times. She was known for her ability to portray the essence of its robust people, their turbulent lives and, above all, their deeply entrenched pathos.

Amrita Kaur, poet and writer: born Gujranwala, India 31 August 1919; married 1935 Pritam Singh (marriage dissolved 1960); died Delhi 31 August 2005. She said at the time, "I intend to go on enjoying myself to the last." She died at BBC Birmingham's studios after recording an episode of The Archers.Jack Adrian. Just this year Mrs Pargetter had remarried, to the amiable architect Lewis Carmichael.In 2004 she was in repertory at Birmingham in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, which then went on tour for two months. Wodehouse's Aunt Agatha (the battleaxe of all battleaxes) in the 1990-93 Stephen Fry/Hugh Laurie Jeeves and Wooster series to parts in Z-Cars, Casualty, Doctors, Heartbeat, Wycliffe and Midsomer Murders.In 1969 she was the "universal mother" Mary Smith in Oh! What a Lovely War - "For years all people have heard is my voice," she said at the time. "Now at last they can see what I look like."Retirement was anathema to her.

The part of Elizabeth Archer's mother-in-law Julia Pargetter, sometime woman friend of the raffish Nelson Gabriel and reformed drunk ("She was particularly interesting to play when she was on the bottle"), seemed only to grow in stature. Her love of radio drama extended beyond The Archers, and she never minded a "good long run". As recently as last week, she appeared as a busybody librarian solving with her spinster sister (Doreen Mantle) a murder in the bookstacks in Stephen Sheridan's Murder by the Book - which had the feel of a try-out for an extended series of plays.On television she again played a wide variety of roles, from P.G. In 1960 - after he had left his second wife, the actress Hedli Anderson - she settled down with the poet and drama producer Louis MacNeice, whose final posthumous volume of poems, The Burning Perch (1963), was dedicated to her.In the BBC studios, her role-range, like that of all great radio voices, was virtually limitless She played the heroine in H.L.V. Fletcher's nerve-shredding drama The Storm (1961), with Oscar Quitak, but was also a firm favourite of the light-comedy writer Alan Melville, acting in his frothy At Your Service (a "Songs of Praise" comedy) in 1976. The celebrated drama producer Audrey Cameron used her in at least two excellent Margery Allingham adaptations (by Felix Felton and Susan Ashman), Look to the Lady (1961) and the sinister Black Plumes (1964), with another grande dame of the airwaves, Marjorie Westbury.During this period she was in the studios with the pick of the BBC Drama Repertory Company actors: David March, Mary O'Farrell, Godfrey Kenton, Rolf Lefebvre, Richard Hurndall, Diana Ollson, Peter Woodthorpe and Patrick Barr. "You never knew when they were going to cut out and fall on you," she recalled years later.In 1946 she married the well-known actor Howard Marion-Crawford, a favourite of radio drama producers on both the Home Service and the new Third Programme, although the marriage did not last long.