A tribute to Amrita Pritam: Courageous Defender of Osho

Amrita Pritam was our fellow-traveller who had the courage and intelligence to defend Osho in his darkest hours when all world governments treated him as a pariah in 1986.

Amrita Pritam was a renowned Punjabi poetess, novelist, and thinker who won the highest literary awards in India. She died today in New Delhi (31st October,05). She was an Osho lover who had a tremendous appreciation and love of Osho.

She distinguished herself by courageously defending Osho's freedom of speech in the Indian Parliament, after Osho returned from his world tour in 1986, when the American Government was very hostile to him, and was pressurising all other nation-states against him.

She wrote an introduction to several of Osho's books, including Ek Omkar Satnam and his most talked about book: "From Sex to Superconsciousness."

Her statements about Osho are very significant. Here are a few statements from her writings:

"Where the dance of Meera and the silence of Buddha meet, blossoms the true philosophy of Osho."

Amrita Pritam considered Osho as representing the greatest flowering of human consciousness. She wrote: "In our world there are so many philosophers who hold on to different philosophies in their hands. And those hands for centuries have been striking each other and the philosophies negating each other's logic. And I have seen than it is only Osho, who, detached from all these philosophies, has been propounding inner experience which is one, whatever and wherever it might be, it is one. And that is the greatest flowering of human consciousness."

In her introduction to Osho's discourses on Japuji Saheb of Guru Nanak Dev, she writes: "Ek Omkar Satnam, the sound of Om alone, is the true name. Osho's voice leads us into the difference between reality and truth. Where science seeks truth through the medium of mind alone and a poet seeks through the medium of the heart, the mind and the heart both fall short. Osho becomes a pointer to that inner experience of Nanak where the two meet and merge, where the duality of science and art is lost and we enter the Omkar.

When Osho's voice rustles in one's interior like a soft breeze, when overburdened like a rain cloud it showers drop by drop, and when it descends into one's being like a ray of the sun, I can say on my own authority that the dormant seed of consciousness starts sprouting. Then the flower of countless colours that blooms can have any name to it. It blooms also as a Gautam Buddha, it blooms also as a Mahavira, it blooms also as a Nanak.

Commenting about Osho and his literature, she wrote: "Osho, the thinker par excellence, gives in these books his thought-provoking views in a clear and unambiguous language. It is said that the clarity of thought is best represented by the manner you put them, and this 'great achievement of our age' has no peer in this field.

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