Sara Shagufta

Sara Shagufta (1954-1984) was a Pakistani poet.^[1] Shagufta's family migrated from Punjab in India to Karachi, Pakistan.^[2] She died in 1984.^[2]

Sara’s work has attracted polemical and highly polarised responses. Some have called her the Virginia Woolf of Pakistan while others have scorned her for being a self-obsessed rambler.

One of the reasons behind the contrasting responses that her work has provoked is perhaps to do with how she suddenly exploded as a poet after living a pretty ordinary bourgeoisie life of a housewife.

Sara Shagufta was born in Gujranwala in 1955. She wrote poetry only fleetingly as a teenager, going through the motions of schooling and willingly being prepared by her parents to one day become a good housewife.

What was unknown to her parents, and maybe even to her, was the fact that her obedience was an unconscious attempt on her part to severely repress a rather volcanic emotional side to her personality that would finally come bursting out much later.

When she first got married in 1972 at the age of 17 she tried her best to become the ‘good wife.’ But her insightful personality and intelligence somehow offended her husband. The marriage didn’t last and she moved on to marry a second time, this time on her own accord.

But when the couple’s child died at birth, the husband (albeit silently) blamed Sara.

This is the moment where what she had been repressing for years finally erupted.

It was a rebirth of sorts but an extremely painful one. The emotional volcano in her had been simmering for far too long. She stormed out of the marriage and began to use the lava that poured out as ink with which she began to write some of the most controversial and intense poetry.

For the next decade or so she would write manic, provocative and yet overtly sensitive poems and looking for a man who would sacrifice his ego to empathise with her now stirred state of mind and sense of love.

She rapidly fell in and out of love, marrying twice more but storming out of these marriages as well.

When the reactionary military man, General Ziaul Haq, toppled the Z A. Bhutto regime in July 1977, Sara turned political.

Though her poems were still mostly about misunderstood women and a longing to be loved and understood despite her turbulent emotional state and individualism, she plunged into political activism, taking part in various anti-Zia rallies and movements. In the early 1980s she was arrested at a time when the military regime was jailing opponents, torturing poets, student activists and intellectuals and publicly flogging journalists.

Many chose to escape into exile, but Shagufta decided to stay. However, as Zia continued to strengthen his grip on power, and Shagufta’s fourth marriage too crumbled, pressed to the brink by her ongoing emotional, intellectual and now political tribulations, she finally ran out of the emotional and intellectual corners that she had constructed for herself to retreat back into.

Then on the night of March 1984, she committed suicide. She was only 29.

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