To read Saeeda Bano’s supremely candid, flamboyant, and emotionally charged narrative of her extraordinary life is to launch oneself on a roller coaster ride of high emotional drama that has its own moments of tragedy and comedy. Intense, funny, heart-breaking and inspirational all at the same time, Saeeda Bano’s story is the story of a woman who dared to break taboos. Filled with staunch optimism in face of insurmountable challenges, exemplary resilience, wisdom and talent, Saeeda Bano’s life story folds in several significant social and political moments in the life of the country and the community, especially from the gender perspective. Mirza Hadi Ruswa’s Umrao Jaan conflates aapbeeti with jagbeeti and says, ‘Lutf hai kaun si kahani mein, / Aap beeti kahoon ya jag beeti’ (‘What pleasure can there be in any tale? The story of my life or of the world?’). Saeeda Bano’s life-narrative is no different. It encapsulates the point Annie Besant made while writing An Autobiography (1893): ‘At best, the telling has a savour of vanity, and the only excuse for the proceeding is that the life, being an average one, reflects many others, and in troublous times like ours may give the experience of many rather than of one.’
Women autobiographers across the world have often reflected on the extent to which a woman’s story is closely entangled with the story of her time and her generation, lending the act of autobiographical writing a political force. Saeeda Bano’s narrative articulates the various negotiations she had to make through a maze of class and gender-related constraints.