Parveen Shakir and the universal language of women’s freedom

Parveen Shakir, one of the most distinctive voices in modern Urdu poetry, explored this question through love, longing, desire and the complexities of being a woman. Her first collection, Khushbu (Fragrance), published in 1976, brought a fresh feminine perspective to Urdu poetry. The woman in her poems was not merely someone to be admired by a man. She was someone who could speak about her own feelings, express her desires and protect her self-respect.

This is where Shakir invites comparison with Jane Austen. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet refuses to marry Mr Collins simply because society considers the match sensible. Her decision shows that a woman’s life cannot be reduced to marriage and financial security. Austen used wit and irony to question the social rules governing women. Shakir approached the question differently, through poetry that allowed a woman to express emotions often left unspoken.

Katherine Mansfield, too, was interested in the private worlds of women. In her short story The Garden Party, Laura Sheridan begins to question the comfortable world of her wealthy family after learning of a working-class man’s death nearby. Mansfield shows how an apparently ordinary day can expose the social divisions people prefer not to see. Like Shakir, she understood that a woman’s inner life can become a place where accepted ideas begin to change.

Virginia Woolf took this search for freedom further. In A Room of One’s Own, she argued that women need financial independence and personal space to write freely. Her concern was not simply whether women possessed talent, but whether society gave them the conditions to develop it. Shakir’s poetry raises a related question: can a woman express herself honestly when social expectations place limits on what she is allowed to feel, say or desire?

These writers should not, however, be treated as identical feminists. Austen examined marriage and social class, Mansfield explored the tensions of everyday life, and Woolf directly addressed women’s intellectual and economic freedom. Shakir worked within the Urdu poetic tradition, giving a woman’s emotional experience a more visible place in literature. Their methods differed, but each made room for perspectives that society could overlook.

Perhaps the most important point is that feminism does not have to speak in one language or follow one literary tradition. A woman’s struggle for dignity may appear in a novel about marriage, a short story about class or a poem about heartbreak. What connects these works is the refusal to treat women’s feelings and choices as unimportant.

Parveen Shakir did not need to write like Woolf or Austen to belong in this conversation. Her contribution was her own: she made the woman’s voice central to her poetry.

And that is why reading Shakir alongside these writers matters. Across languages and cultures, literature reminds us that women are not merely characters in someone else’s story. They are also its authors.

References: Parveen Shakir, Khushbu (1976); see also the Parveen Shakir poetry archive at Rekhta; Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922), including “The Garden Party; other works discussed: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813); Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929).