Inscribing the Sacred upon the Sinful: A Study of Piro’s Autobiographical Verses

Abstract

The paper explores the manner, in which Piro, a prostitute from nineteenth century Lahore, and her autobiographical verses titled 160 Kafiyan¹, interrupt the metanarrative of pure and uncorrupted Indian womanhood in colonial India and thus offer an alternative revisionist historiography to the nationalist history which instead modelled its anti-imperial ideology on the preservation of the private, inner sphere of the home with the model Indian chaste woman as its emblem. Piro, self-confessedly a prostitute from Heeramandi, and a Muslim, came to live in the ‘Sikh’ Gulabdasi sect situated in Chathiawala, after a chance encounter with its charismatic, spiritual leader, Guru Gulab Das. This daring step from a courtesan to a consort of the guru makes her the target of the upholders of Islamic orthodoxy, and she is charged of apostasy. Her manuscript, a tattered book preserved in digitized form in a university archive in Punjab, evokes Bhakti imagery through which Piro taps into its radical potentialities, but simultaneously relies on social conformity as she emphasizes her identity as Guru Gulabdas’ consort as well. Her vehement assertion of her dual identities of a courtesan and a consort interrupts the strictly compartmentalized binary categorization of the public woman and the housewife.