Ek Thi Saraएक थी सारा

About the book

Ek Thi Sara, which means There Was a Sara, is a book by Amrita Pritam about the Pakistani poet Sara Shagufta. It was published in Hindi by Kitabghar in New Delhi in 1990, six years after Sara's death at the age of twenty-nine. Pritam, one of the most loved Punjabi writers of the twentieth century, had been Sara's close friend, and the book tells the short life of a woman who wrote fierce, unconventional poetry and paid a high price for the way she lived.

The book is catalogued as a novel, but it reads as a portrait drawn from a real life: Pritam follows Sara from a poor childhood in Karachi through four marriages, the loss of her children, hospital stays and a growing reputation as a poet, to her death on a railway crossing in 1984. Four years later Pritam returned to the same subject with Life and Poetry of Sara Shagufta (1994), which printed Sara's poems alongside her account of the poet's life. Together the two books kept Sara's name alive in India after her death in Pakistan.

Who was Sara Shagufta?

Sara Shagufta was born on 31 October 1954 in Gujranwala, in what is now Pakistan. Her family had migrated from Punjab and settled in Karachi in the 1960s, and she grew up in the Drigh Colony area of the city, in a lower-class household where money was always short. Her father remarried and left the family, and her mother supported her children through home-based work such as making flower garlands. Sara's own letters describe a childhood of economic hardship, and even hunger.

She was married, by force, at the age of seventeen. The couple had a child who died as a newborn, and the blame for the baby's death was put on Sara, which led to divorce. Three more marriages followed, and all of them ended in divorce. The years brought domestic violence, custody battles and forced separation from her children, and hospital stays for mental illness. She could not pass her school matriculation, yet by a young age she had acquired fame as a poet who shunned convention in her verses and in her personal life.

Sara wrote in Urdu and Punjabi. Her collections of poetry, Aankhein and Neend Ka Rang, were published after her death by Saeed Ahmed, a man she had loved. Her poems reached English readers as The Colour of Sleep and Other Poems (2016), translated by Asad Alvi, and some of them also appear in We Sinful Women, Rukhsana Ahmad's anthology of contemporary Urdu feminist poetry.

A friendship across the border

Amrita Pritam and Sara Shagufta knew each other as friends, across the border that divided their Punjabs. Pritam was thirty-five years older, a famous writer in Delhi; Sara was a young poet in Karachi with almost nothing, fighting the literary world and her own family at the same time. The friendship mattered to both of them: to Sara, Pritam was a famous elder who took her seriously as a poet, and to Pritam, Sara was a younger woman living the defiance that Pritam herself had written about all her life.

That is what gives Ek Thi Sara its feeling. It is not a cold biography written from documents, but a friend's account of a woman she knew, written after that woman was gone. Pritam tells Sara's life as a story of talent meeting a society that had no room for a poor woman who refused to behave, and she does not hide the cost: the marriages, the hospitals, the children taken away and the loneliness of the last years.

What the book does

The book's central question is one that still follows Sara's name: why was a poet of her gifts remembered as much for her life as for her poems? In his 2013 column remembering her, the writer Kamran Asdar Ali described how polite literary society praised Sara's talent while denigrating her way of living: staying out late, befriending men, romantic liaisons, and not covering herself with a dupatta. Ali argued that much of this stigma was tied to her lower-class background, and to her attempt to enter middle-class literary respectability on her own terms.

Pritam's book answers that judgement by staying with Sara's own voice: her letters, her poems and her choices. It shows a woman who claimed the right to write, to love and to live as she pleased, and who was punished for each of those claims. In Shahid Anwar's play Main Sara, which opened in India in 2011, she is called Urdu's first angry young poet, a label that catches both the fire of her poems and the anger that polite society felt towards her.

Sara died on 4 June 1984, some months short of her thirtieth birthday. Late that evening, around eleven o'clock, a local train struck a woman at the railway crossing in Drigh Colony, Karachi. A copy of Qurratulain Hyder's novel Sheeshay kay Ghar was found on the body, with Sara's address written in it, along with a packet of incense sticks. The authorities treated the death as a suicide, but friends noted the incense sticks and said she may have been on her way to her mother's nearby grave. Whether it was suicide or accident was left open, and the uncertainty has stayed with her story ever since.

ਲੇਖਕ

Amrita Pritam (1919-2005) was a Punjabi poet, novelist and essayist born in Gujranwala, and the first woman to win the Sahitya Akademi Award, for her long poem Sunehade in 1956. She wrote in Punjabi and Hindi for almost seventy years and published more than a hundred books. Her Partition poem Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu and her novel Pinjar (1950) made her the best known woman's voice in modern Punjabi literature, loved on both sides of the India-Pakistan border. She received the Padma Shri in 1969, the Bharatiya Jnanpith for Kagaz te Canvas, and the Padma Vibhushan in 2004. Ek Thi Sara belongs to the last part of her career, when she was writing about the women she had known and the lives they had lived. She has her own entry in this Kosh.

Reception and legacy

Ek Thi Sara kept Sara Shagufta's name in print in India, and it became the source other writers drew on. Two plays about Sara's life were built on Pritam's books: Main Sara (Me, Sara) by Shahid Anwar, and Sara Ka Sara Aasman by Danish Iqbal, directed by Tarique Hameed, which was presented by the Wings Cultural Society at All India Radio's Urdu Theatre Festival in 2015. Her poems continue to be read in Urdu, in Punjabi and in English translation, and she is still discussed as a poet who broke the rules of both verse and respectability.

The book's lasting value is as a record of a friendship and a warning. Pritam, who had spent her own life fighting the same judgements, saw in Sara what happens when a woman's talent is welcomed and her life is not. Ek Thi Sara does not rescue Sara from that judgement; it lets her speak, in her poems and in her letters, and leaves the reader to decide what her short life was worth.