Piro: Panjab’s Lost Sufi Poet and Voice of Feminism in the 18th Century

The Turks have confined us in codes of Quran, the Hindus too imprison us; one follows the West, the other follows the South…Trapped they are in their differing ways. What to do with the women? They both do not know. This verse speaks of the hardships faced by women in the 18^th-century Panjab. It is from the autobiography of the Sufi Poet Piro Preman—Ik Sau Sathh Kafian (160 Kafis). Kafi is a folk song in Panjabi. Piro Preman, born in 1832, shapes her autobiographical work, Ik Sau Sathh Kafian, amid a fraught cultural landscape of the undivided Panjab where disparities based on caste, class, and gender abounded. A special Sufi session dedicated to the trailblazing poet was held at Majha House in Amritsar, featuring author and historian Anshu Malhotra, Professor and Kundan Kaur Kapany Chair in Sikh and Punjab Studies in the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In the Sufi tradition, Piro was the first female poet of Panjab, and in that context, her work and presence are significant. She became the voice of dissent and feminism in 18^th century Panjab but remains omitted from today’s history and memory. As historical accounts document, Piro was a Muslim courtesan sold to a brothel in Lahore’s Heeramandi (red light district) area. But Piro joined the Ghulab Dasi sect, rejected the tenets of religion and society, and lived by her own rules. Malhotra, in her latest book Piro and the Gulabdasis: Gender, Sect and Society in Punjab, explores Piro’s Ikk Sau Sathh Kafian, and examines how she challenged social and religious hierarchies, becoming perhaps the lone voice of a woman of the time. Malhotra studied the research work of former Guru Nanak Dev University professor Santokh Singh Sheharyar, who documented and archived Piro’s original manuscripts. Malhotra says, ‘Piro was a woman who had no sect, no clan, and no panth. She claimed her space as a shudra (low caste) woman…which made her all the more marginalized. But she never thought of that as her weakness. It’s a tragedy that with time, Piro’s literary footprints disappeared’ (earlier coverage).