Biography and Lay of the Land

Born into a middle-class Shia family in Karachi on November 24, 1952, Shakir was the second child of Bihari migrants Syed Shakir Hussain and Afzal-un-Nisa.Footnote ¹ Growing up, she was close to her older sister, Nasreen. From her childhood days, Shakir showed a keen interest in reading and education and was encouraged in these pursuits by her parents. She started school at Islamia High School of Rizvia Colony at the age of three. After class five, she attended the Rising Sun school for a short while and was then transferred to Rizvia Girls Secondary School. Her official schooling was complemented by informal poetic training at home. Her father’s friend’s uncle Syed Hasan Askari, whom she referred to as her nānā or maternal grandfather, inducted her into the world of poetic arts. Growing up, she found the recitations of the ẕākirahs (reciters) at the majlis, or Shia religious gathering, particularly entrancing.

After passing her Matriculation Board exams with high marks in 1966, Shakir enrolled at the Sir Syed College for Girls to complete her Faculty of Arts (F.A.) Higher Secondary Certificate. During this time, she began participating in poetic competitions and programs at Radio Pakistan, supported by her teacher Irfana Aziz and supervisor Yawar Mehdi. She also wrote articles for the daily Jang newspaper. After graduating with her F.A., she was admitted to Karachi University in 1969, receiving a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in English in 1971. In the same year, a friend submitted her poems to Funūn magazine in Lahore, edited by the eminent poet, Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi. The poems were accepted, and Qasmi’s lifelong mentorship of Shakir began. In 1972, she completed a Master of Arts (M.A.) in English literature also from Karachi University, and in 1973 she began teaching at Abdullah College for Girls in Karachi. She fell in love around this time with a government official who eventually proposed to her despite the difference in their religious backgrounds. The match was unacceptable to her parents, and the romantic liaison ended. In 1976, she was married to a distant relative, Syed Naseer Ali, who worked as a medical doctor. The following year, Shakir’s first collection of poetry, Khushbū or Fragrance, was published to great acclaim. The collection was dedicated to Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, whom Shakir endearingly called ammu or uncle, and its cover was designed by famed artist Sadequain (1930–1987). In 1979, her son Murad was born. The following year, her second verse collection was published. Entitled Ṣad Barg or Marigold, it was dedicated to her mother.

In 1981 she received a second Master of Arts from Karachi University, this time in English linguistics. Soon after, she decided to switch career paths and took the entrance exam for the Pakistan Civil Services. She passed the exam with great distinction and enrolled for training at the Civil Services Academy in Lahore. After graduating from the Academy with high marks, she was posted in Customs in Karachi. Incidentally, there was a question on her poetry in the Urdu section of the exam. In 1985, her third poetic collection was published, entitled Ḵẖud Kalāmī or Soliloquy. This was dedicated to her son, Murad. In 1986, she was transferred to the Central Board of Revenue in Islamabad. Her marriage, long troubled by the growing intellectual and personal differences between the couple, was dissolved in 1987. Shakir retained primary custody of her son and agreed to the stipulation in the divorce agreement that ended this custody if she were to ever remarry.

In Islamabad, she found a new circle of civil servants and bureaucrats that supplemented and even supplanted her extant literary affiliations. She began to host the literary program Sukhanwar, on Pakistan Television in 1987, and traveled often for international poetic gatherings or mushā‘irahs. In 1990, her fourth verse collection was published. Entitled Inkār or Refusal, this was dedicated to her close friend and fellow civil servant Parveen Qadir Agha. Having won a Fulbright Teaching Award, she traveled to the United States to teach courses on South Asian literature, history, and culture at the University of Connecticut at Hartford in the same year. After finishing up this program in 1991, she completed a Master’s in Public Administration (M.P.A.) through the Edward Mason Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1992. Shortly after her return to Pakistan, she had her four verse collections collated and published under the title Māh-i Tamām, or The Full Moon, in 1994. This effort was a source of consternation to many, who viewed it as a premature, ominous act of finality for the young poet. On December 26, 1994, her car collided with a speeding bus at the intersection of Faisal and Margalla Roads in Islamabad. The driver did not survive the crash; Shakir, who was in the passenger seat, was transported to the hospital, where she succumbed to her injuries. She was buried in the graveyard of Sector H-8 in Islamabad, where poets Josh Malihabadi (1898–1982) and Ahmed Faraz (1931–2008) also rest.Footnote ²

Throughout her life and even in death, Shakir did not receive unqualified acceptance in the Urdu literary domain. She was dogged both by the Progressives and Progressive feminists for what they viewed as her socially uncommitted verse. Traced to the mid-1930s, the Progressive Writers Movement (PWM) was started by a group of Indian litterateurs influenced by Marxist ideas and ideals. They advocated for a literature that addressed social injustices perpetrated by oppressions of class, caste, politics, religion, and gender. A response to what they viewed as the decadence of classical verse, they called out the ghazal specifically for inculcating a complacency within the Indian population. Although in Pakistan the PWM was officially ended as an organization in the early 1950s, poets and writers continued to align along its values. A counter to the PWM was the Ḥalqah-i Arbāb-i Ẕauq or Circle of Interlocutors of Good Taste. Set up in the late 1930s, the group urged a loyalty to aesthetics in the pursuit of art. Their slogan, “art for art’s sake,” was in direct opposition to “the art for life” credo of the Progressives.Footnote ³ Shakir did not overtly identify with either camp, or with the burgeoning group of Urdu feminist poets of the 1980s onward whose ideology was informed heavily by Progressive thought. A combination of her demeanor, personal and professional life, and poetry united to alienate her from the hegemonic core of the established Urdu literary community (perhaps her immense popularity among all demographics of the Pakistani public was a factor in this ostracization). The result was that Shakir remained a peripheral figure in elite Urdu literary circles in Pakistan—a situation only worsened by her death. In my fieldwork in Pakistan in 2022, I found that with the exception of poets like Iftikhar Arif and Yasmeen Hameed (1952–), no major poet or literary critic considered Shakir a worthy subject of academic study. For the critics, she was a technically sound poet, well-versed in the art and matter of prosody, yet with nothing meaningful to say.Footnote ⁴

This prevailing attitude toward Shakir is best represented by the thoughts of prominent feminist-Progressive poet Fahmida Riaz (1946–2018). Toward the end of Shakir’s life, Riaz authored an essay that placed Shakir in a peripheral role to the feminist movement in the country, eternally consigned to the margins of its prime leadership. Riaz begins her essay in admiration of Shakir’s verse, praising its aesthetic qualities and soundness of genre:

Yet, she changes tack midway, exhorting Shakir to switch registers in her verse and demonstrate a more vociferous embrace of feminist and commitment agendas:

As I argue in this article, such criticisms of Shakir’s verse and attitude are easily dismissed through recourse to her poetry, which contains numerous instances of socially oriented, politically aware, and critical discourse on the Pakistani nation-state and its affiliated hegemonic structures. The subsequent sections of this article lay out various facets of her engagement with the state, including issues of nationalism, patriotism, criticism of political demagogues, and institutions such as the Pakistani Army and Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI), and finally, some concluding remarks.

Pakistani and Muhājir Nationalism

Shakir’s verse compositions often center the state and range from adulatory, celebratory narratives to skeptical appraisals with a deep grounding in the religious, cultural, and historical roots of the South Asian region. There is no doubt that she exhibits great love for her country; a deep affection that inclines her to equally strong criticism of its shortfalls and failings. In “A Poem for My Land,” she expounds on the creation of Pakistan in religio-mystical, devotional terms. The opening lines of the piece introduce two elements that evoke immediately a dense lineage in the Islamicate literary tradition—dreams and eyes. Dreams and visions hold the status of prophecy in Islam, becoming a source of inspiration, concern, interpretation, and foresight in a myriad leaders and religious figures over time.Footnote ⁷ By positing the creation of Pakistan as a dream manifested in its founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948), Shakir places Quaid-i Azam, as he was known, alongside notable figures such as Prophets Muhammad and Ibrahim, India’s Mughal emperors, and revered Sufi poets and theologians. In the classical poetic tradition, the eyes are the seat of the beloved and their perception. The canonical lover Majnun roams the streets and deserts in frenzied passion for his dark-skinned, beloved Laila. When others question his actions, bemused by what they think is the unremarkable beauty of Laila, Majnun’s response is to invite his detractors to sit in his pupils to view Laila as he does.Footnote ⁸ The first line of the poem then establishes the devotional parameters of the constructs and images within. These dreams, which are the worship of the eyes, find expression in the natural world, manifesting as the elements, moods, and seasons. They are the asbāt or affirmation of the flower and song and the negation or nafī of many nights of sleep. Shakir’s use of this terminology is pregnant, bringing to mind the ultimate negation-affirmation nexus of the fundamental Muslim credo “La-illaha-il-allah” or “There is no God but God.”Footnote ⁹ It evokes the plight of the tenth-century mystic Mansur Al-Hallaj, who was taken to the gallows for his inability to process the reality of the first half of this credo and declared himself at one with the truth of God.Footnote ¹⁰ By framing dreams as the interpretation of the essence or zāt, Shakir draws on the distinction between the internal attributes of God or the zāt and his external qualities or ṣifāt. In the mystical tradition, it is through constant recounting of the ṣifāt that the true essence or zāt of God can be known.Footnote ¹¹ As such, dreams are parallel to the loftiest form of knowledge, that of God.

The dream that deposits itself in the imagination of the “son of autumn” (see verse below), the Quaid, is thus both a universal and personal conception. A manifestation of the collective inner yearnings of a populace, both human and not, the dream of a new land dominates the consciousness of this individual. He stays awake through the Indic moonless nights of amāvas that are most distant from the night of the full moon and hence union with the beloved. When the new season finally arrives, the flag of Pakistan with the crescent and star is suddenly visible, bringing with it freedom and prosperity. The land of Azar, the father of the prophet Ibrahim, who opposed Ibrahim’s embrace and dissemination of the message of Islam, is replete with the sound of the call to prayer.Footnote ¹² The hold of tyrants is broken and the clearest message of a dar-ul Islam or abode of Islam is sounded. Shakir’s conception of the creation of Pakistan is relayed in hopeful, devotional, collectivist terms.

While celebrating a more universalized notion of Pakistani nationalism, Shakir also invokes what can be termed a sense of Pakistani muhājir nationalism, or an identification with the specific group of Muslim Indian migrants who agitated for the creation of a Muslim homeland in the early twentieth century and braved difficult circumstances to relocate to its borders in the bloody Partition of 1947. In “To the Ganges,” she brings together the Tigris, Mehran or Indus, Ravi, and the Ganges—rivers that form the historically interconnected landscape of the Middle East, Central and South Asia. With roots in ancient civilizations such as Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, the rivers stand also for the construction of modern nationalist sensibilities. The Tigris is the river that flows through Iraq, a region of seminal importance for Shias as the site of the Battle of Karbala in 680 AD, which defined the formalization of the sect.Footnote ¹⁴ By drawing a link between the Tigris and the Ganges, Shakir knits a connection between the historical past of the Shias and the members of their population resident in the Gangetic plains in the Indian subcontinent from at least the eleventh century onward. She follows the flow of the Ganges to the Indus and Ravi Rivers, which flow through the area that now constitutes Pakistan, representing the hijrat or migration of Indian Muslims from the Gangetic plains to the newly created country. Hinging on the Ganges, Shakir hints at a history of multiple migrations that ultimately results in the settlement of muhājirs in Pakistan.

The Ganges forms the central protagonist of the poem; springing from the Tigris, it spawns fields and villages that are the ancestral heritage of those who now populate the region of the Indus River. It is replete with diyās or lamps, which devotees of all faiths light and place on the river as a ritual offering, the radiance of which pours into the River Indus. Shakir’s plea to the Ganges is that it remain abundant but conscious of its progeny; generous but not overpowering. As such, she asks the modern nation-state where the Ganges is resident, India, to maintain a cautious and not belligerent attitude toward the land where her mother is buried or “lies hidden within,” Pakistan. Shakir centers a distinct muhājir or migrant identity and claim. To the Muslims of the north Indian Ganga-Jamuni belt and culture who chose to migrate to Pakistan after Partition, the Ganges holds a particular sway—one that Shakir is hearkening to here. Evoking the mixed Hindu-Muslim heritage of this north Indian culture, as well as the roots of the migrant community she is part of, Shakir appeals to the Ganges.

The Fragility of Borders and Belonging

In addition to her allegiance to her land and its people, Shakir does not hesitate to critique notions of unquestioned nationalism. She is sensitive to the fissures within allied groups and the brittle nature of seemingly unbreakable convictions. While she cautions India to respect Pakistan’s sovereign borders in “To the Ganges,” she is simultaneously critical of the farcical nature of the concepts that construct these very divides. In “The Daughter of a Shared Enemy,” Shakir tests the limits of modern nationalisms and the purported hostility and distance between the nation-states of India and Pakistan, carved out of the broader Indian subcontinent in a moment of haste. The poem is set in a Chinese restaurant where Shakir and her colleagues spar over a meal. The conversation of her colleagues on India is textured, ranging from shared cultural artefacts and materials of interest to the various skirmishes and wars between India and Pakistan over the years. They are content to discuss Indian fabrics, movies based in India, and the iconic Mughal structure claimed by descendants on both sides of the border. Yet, when Shakir articulates the slightest hint of a defense of the Indian position, it is received with hostility and outrage. Ironically, the ice is thawed by the voice of one of India’s most popular playback singers of the twenty-first century, Lata Mangeshkar (1929–2022), whose song begins to play in the restaurant. Shakir’s poem examines the limits of the concepts of patriotism and nationalism, the fragility of such constructs, and the exclusion that voicing the latent truth can engender.

This exclusion, hinted at in the previous poem, takes on a more concrete and personal form in “To the Children of the Land.” Shakir interrogates the fragility of belonging, a privilege that can be revoked at any moment regardless of longevity and depth of association. Whereas in “Ganga Se” she evinces a certain muhājir nationalism; here, Shakir laments the limits of this identification. She gestures to the fraught status of muhājirs in Pakistan in the 1980s—a community that she belonged to as the child of Bihari migrants from India. Ascendant in the creation and early days of Pakistan, by the early 1970s the muhājirs found their political and sociocultural heft in decline.Footnote ²² With the shift of the country’s capital from Karachi to Islamabad in 1967, the strengthening role of an army with majority Punjabi and Pashtun participation, and the political rise of the Pakistan People’s Party, led by Sindhi landlord Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1928–1979), the muhājir community found itself increasingly alienated from power centers in the country. This discontent manifested itself in major cities in Sindh such as Karachi, the base of muhājir settlement post-Partition, and Hyderabad. It was in the latter city in 1972 that riots broke out between muhājir and Sindhi students when Sindhi was elevated to the language of instruction alongside Urdu, and quotas were introduced in government jobs and educational institutions to create parity between Sindhi and muhājir students. It was in Shakir’s alma mater Karachi University that in 1978 muhājir student activists created the All-Pakistan Muhajir Student Organization (APMSO), which went on to become the major political party, the Muhajir Qaumi Movement, in 1984. Through the 1980s and 1990s, strife between muhājirs and other ethnic groups dominated Karachi’s landscape. It is against this background that we can view Shakir’s plea to her countrymen on behalf of the muhājir community she is part of.

In continuing to share her feelings about the muhajir presence in the new state, in the poem “Farzand e Zameen Se” (see below), Shakir laments that the house that she and her parents have occupied for a quarter century is no longer open to them. Its foundations contain the fundamental marks of her family’s dignity and honor—the dupaṭṭā or veil that grants her mother protection and the turban that signals her father’s high religious and social status. Shakir alludes here to how muhājirs, having poured themselves passionately into the construction of Pakistan, were suddenly viewed as figures of suspicion despite the longevity and depth of their association with the country. Her crime is that of identity, a split that seems artificial given the belief of her countrymen in a shared authority figure, the master or āqā, the Prophet Muhammad. The wind coming from the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia evokes immediately a contemporary of Prophet Muhammad, the Yemeni Owais al-Qarani. Known as the archetypal devotee, his longing for the Prophet was such that he is said to have felt the grace of his presence in the breeze emerging from the Hijaz and flowing to Yemen. Shakir gestures also to the Prophet’s migration to Yathrib, the pre-Islamic name of Madina, where he and his followers were welcomed with open arms. Whereas she is being made to prove herself, the beloved Prophet had merely to voice his need and was embraced by his neighboring city. Shakir points to the hypocrisy of a people who are ostensibly devoted to ideals of religious goodwill but do not partake in these themselves.

Opposition to Zia-ul Haq

As may be clear from the above discussion, Shakir’s identification in her poetry with the emergent question of muhājir identity politics in the 1970s is intrinsically linked to how Urdu and Islam play determining roles in notions of official Pakistani nationalist narrative. This said, she was also criticized for her supposed reluctance to take a strong stance against the military dictatorship of General Zia-ul Haq (1924–1988). She is denounced for her refusal to affiliate with the Women’s Action Forum, the major feminist organization that publicly voiced its opposition to Zia’s restrictive gender-based Islamist policies in the 1980s, as well as for her inability to render her defiance to his rule in verse form.Footnote ²⁴ Yet, a turn to her corpus reveals poetry that is deeply critical of Zia-ul Haq, merely veiled in symbolic language that requires an additional layer of interpretation. In “The Preambles of the Shadow of God,” Shakir uses premodern Persianate vocabulary, which serves to distance the intent yet remains relevant in its impact. In a threatening reminder to Zia, she underscores the hollowness of political institutions that are supposedly omnipotent yet face treachery at every turn. Her use of the term “.ẓill-i ilāhī” or “Shadow of God” to refer to the ruler of the age is pregnant with resonances of divinely inspired kings and monarchs who reigned before modern concepts of democracy and progress took hold. The belligerence of subservient states and various notables is encased in Persianate language. Words such as “pāyih takht” for “capital,” “sipāh salār-i ā‘.ẓam” for “army commander,” “ḥaram sarā” for the “inner sanctum,” and so on, evoke the contours of premodern Persianate states such as those of the Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman Empires. Yet, the criticism in the poem is equally angled at modern demagogues like Zia-ul Haq, who operate as though they have been granted divine sanction. If he is to rule with the might of those who commanded vast empires, he should be prepared to anticipate the betrayal and tumult inherent in those states as well.

Shakir extends this critique of Zia-era rule in “It’s Very Humid.” She voices her displeasure with the suffocating ambiance of the country engendered by the strict rules Zia has ordained. In his authoritarian martial law rule from 1977 to 1988, Zia dispensed with all democratic institutions. He instituted a program of Islamization that included the introduction of Sharia Courts to evaluate the Islamic credentials of all laws at federal and lower levels, strict private and state media censorship, and mandatory Islamic taxes.Footnote ²⁶ Women faced the great brunt of his policies. In 1979, women were required to dress in an “Islamic” manner in government offices, and in 1980 they were banned from attending spectator sports. Under the Hudood Ordinances, adultery or zinā, previously considered a private matter in the courts, was now under the purview of the state and punishable as such. Moreover, the ordinance conflated adultery and rape so that women did not have recourse to the legal system in matters of forced sexual assault.Footnote ²⁷ “It’s Very Humid” is best understood against this political background. The poem paints a dismal picture of the stifling atmosphere at play in the state. A far cry from the classical poetic seasons of spring and autumn, the humidity invoked conjures up a certain reality of stagnation and entrapment. The garden, the conventional space for love, aesthetic beauty, socially subversive rendezvous, and freedom of expression, is locked and fragrance curtailed. The older order is replaced by a new one so that familiar, comforting faces have vanished, and unjust, nondiscerning laws rule the country. There is a universal disconnect between words and meaning. Not only action, but even mere perception is worthy of punishment by the ruler of the age.

Critique of the Pakistani Army and Inter-Services Intelligence Agency

Not only is Shakir unafraid to criticize the political contours of Zia’s repressive state, but she also specifically targets institutions under his control. In “A Prayer for 6 September 1987,” Shakir homes in on the institution of the army that had morphed into the dominant political force in the country by the time the poem was published. After merely ten years of existence, Pakistan was placed under military rule in 1958, which continued until 1971. Only a few years later, the civilian government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was deposed by Zia ul-Haq and marital law promulgated again from 1977 to 1988. Having successfully disrupted the establishment of any legitimate democratic process in the country, the army expanded its role within the political, legal, industrial, and social realms.Footnote ³⁰ Shakir indicts the institution of the army for its morphing priorities, framing her criticism within a prayer for the date earmarked to celebrate “Defense Day” in commemoration of military sacrifices in the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War. No longer concerned largely with the protection of the country’s borders and international sovereignty, the troops now operate in anticipation of the rewards they would gain by ascending the army’s internal hierarchy. Allowing their bodies to decay and their military skills to atrophy, they are found following keenly political intrigues in the so-called court of their master and indulging in sycophantic behavior in the hope of material recompense. Shakir laments in direct terms the misplaced priorities of a wayward military force—a bold statement in a time of acute censorship and repression.

Shakir articulates her clearest defiance of the ruling order and the conviction of her sense of belonging in “Challenge.” She identifies the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s intelligence agency with close historical links to the army, as responsible for the midnight threat that lands at her doorstep.Footnote ³² Accused of writing inappropriate poetry, she is banned from exiting the country. The order comes from the top but is relayed through a relic of the colonial order, the harkārah or peon who is expected to perform all manner of tasks without complaint. Shakir’s strategic use of the word for “peon” intimates that although it may now purport to function as an independent country, Pakistan persists in perpetuating the ethics of governance of its erstwhile colonizers. Despite the lofty corners that the order descends from, Shakir is resolute that the soil of the country that has birthed and nourished her will recognize her fealty. It is in fact the ISI that is corrupt in its intentions, having been sold to the highest external bidder.