Parveen Shakir: A Woman's Voice That Changed Modern Urdu Ghazal

Before Parveen Shakir

For centuries, the Urdu ghazal was addressed by a male speaker to a beloved who was usually imagined as female, silent and unreachable. Women poets existed, but the dominant voice, vocabulary and imagery were masculine. When Parveen Shakir (1952–1994) published her first collection, Khushbu, in 1976, she did something that seems simple now but was radical then: she wrote from inside a woman's experience, without translating it into the old conventions.

Fragrance as a recurring idea

Her title was not accidental. Scent — fleeting, personal, unprovable — runs through her poems as a metaphor for love, memory and the self. One of her best-known couplets plays with it directly:

"Wo to khushboo hai hawaaon mein bikhar jaayega,
Masla phool ka hai phool kidhar jaayega."
— Parveen Shakir

He is fragrance, the poet says, and will spread on the wind. The real dilemma belongs to the flower — where will it go, once the scent has left? The verse shifts our sympathy from the one who leaves to the one who is left, and it quietly asks who gets to be the subject of a love poem.

Honesty, wit and a refusal to play small

Shakir's poems admit desire, doubt and self-interest without apology. She also had a sharp, almost conversational wit:

"Main sach kahungi magar phir bhi haar jaaungi,
Wo jhoot bolega aur laajawab kar dega."
— Parveen Shakir

The speaker predicts she will lose an argument even with the truth on her side, because the other will lie so smoothly. It is a dry, bruised joke about how persuasion and honesty often travel on separate roads.

Life and legacy

She taught English literature, then joined the civil service in Pakistan. Her later collections include Sad-barg, Khud-kalami, Inkaar and Mah-e-tamam. She died in a road accident in Islamabad in 1994, aged 42, at the height of her reputation. Many readers still discover her at exactly the age she was when she wrote her first poems — the late teens and twenties.

Women poets to read alongside her

• Kishwar Naheed — forceful, feminist and openly political.
• Fahmida Riaz — fearless in subject, from the body to the state.
• Zehra Nigah — gentler, with an aristocratic restraint.

Reading them together gives a map of how Urdu poetry learned to listen to women — and what it sounds like when they speak for themselves.