Famous Essayists from India
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List of notable or famous essayists from India, with bios and photos, including the top essayists born in India and even some popular essayists who immigrated ...
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Amrita Pritam (Gurmukhi: ਅੰਮ੍ਰਿਤਾ ਪ੍ਰੀਤਮ) listen (31 August 1919 – 31 October 2005) was an Indian novelist, essayist and poet, who wrote in Punjabi and Hindi. She is considered the first prominent woman Punjabi poet, novelist, essayist and the leading 20th-century poet of the Punjabi language, who is equally loved on both sides of the India-Pakistan border. With a career spanning over six decades, she produced over 100 books of poetry, fiction, biographies, essays, a collection of Punjabi folk songs and an autobiography that were translated into several Indian and foreign languages.She is most remembered for her poignant poem, Ajj aakhaan Waris Shah nu (Today I invoke Waris Shah – "Ode to Waris Shah"), an elegy to the 18th-century Punjabi poet, an expression of her anguish over massacres during the partition of India. As a novelist, her most noted work was Pinjar (The Skeleton) (1950), in which she created her memorable character, Puro, an epitome of violence against women, loss of humanity and ultimate surrender to existential fate; the novel was made into an award-winning film, Pinjar in 2003.When the former British India was partitioned into the independent states of India and Pakistan in 1947, she migrated from Lahore, to India, though she remained equally popular in Pakistan throughout her life, as compared to her contemporaries like Mohan Singh and Shiv Kumar Batalvi. Known as the most important voice for the women in Punjabi literature, in 1956, she became the first woman to win the Sahitya Akademi Award for her magnum opus, a long poem, Sunehade (Messages), later she received the Bharatiya Jnanpith, one of India's highest literary awards, in 1982 for Kagaz Te Canvas (The Paper and the Canvas). The Padma Shri came her way in 1969 and finally, Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian award, in 2004, and in the same year she was honoured with India's highest literary award, given by the Sahitya Akademi (India's Academy of Letters), the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship given to the "immortals of literature" for lifetime achievement.

Dharamvir Bharati (25 December 1926 – 4 September 1997) was a renowned Hindi poet, author, playwright and a social thinker of India. He was the chief editor of the popular Hindi weekly magazine Dharmayug, from 1960 till his death in 1997.Bharati was awarded the Padma Shree for literature in 1972 by the Government of India. His novel Gunaho Ka Devta became a classic. Bharati's Suraj ka Satwan Ghoda is considered a unique experiment in story-telling and was made into a National Film Award-winning movie by the same name in 1992 by Shyam Benegal. Andha Yug, a play set immediately after the Mahabharata war, is a classic that is frequently performed in public by drama groups[3]. He was awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in Playwriting (Hindi) in 1988, given by Sangeet Natak Akademi, India's National Academy of Music, Dance and Drama.