Ismat Chughtai

Ismat Chughtai was the most daring and influential woman writer in Urdu and one of the great writers of modern Indian fiction. A member of the Progressive Writers' Movement, she wrote short stories, novels, sketches and memoirs about the lives of women — particularly in the middle-class Muslim households of north India — with a frankness about sexuality, desire and oppression that shocked her contemporaries, and in a racy, colloquial, witty style drawn from women’s everyday speech that transformed Urdu prose. Her story “Liḥāf” (“The Quilt”, 1942), about a neglected wife’s sexual relationship with her maid seen through the eyes of a child, led to her trial for obscenity in Lahore in 1944; her semi-autobiographical novel Ṭeṛhī Lakīr (“The Crooked Line”, 1943) is a landmark of Urdu fiction.

Life

Ismat Chughtai was born on 21 August 1915 in Badayun, Uttar Pradesh, the ninth of ten children of a civil servant, Mirza Qasim Baig Chughtai, and grew up in towns of north India and Rajasthan. Her elder brother Azim Beg Chughtai was a well-known humorist. Growing up among brothers, she climbed trees, played rough games and refused to be confined; she fought her family to be educated, studied at Isabella Thoburn College, Lucknow and Aligarh, and became one of the first Indian Muslim women to earn a BA and a teaching degree (B.Ed.). She worked as a teacher and inspector of schools in Bombay. There she joined the Progressive Writers, befriended Saadat Hasan Manto, and in 1942 married Shahid Latif, a film director, with whom she worked on films. She wrote and co-wrote screenplays for Hindi cinema, including Ziddī (1948), and the story on which M. S. Sathyu’s Garm Hava (1973), about a Muslim family in Agra after Partition, was based. She received the Padma Shri (1976). She died in Bombay on 24 October 1991 and, at her own wish, was cremated.

Liḥāf

“Liḥāf” (“The Quilt”), published in the Urdu journal Adab-e-Latīf in 1942, is told by a woman remembering a winter when, as a small girl, she was left in the care of Begum Jan, a beautiful young wife whose rich, older husband, the Nawab, ignores her entirely, preferring the company of young male students. Begum Jan, lonely and wasting away, revives through the attentions of her maidservant, Rabbu, who massages her day and night. At night, the child watches the shadow of the quilt over the begum’s bed heave and swell, like an elephant struggling inside, and hears strange sounds. One night, when Rabbu is away, Begum Jan tries to embrace the child. In the last scene the quilt lifts for a moment in the dark and the child sees something that she will not tell “for even a lakh of rupees”.

The story, never naming anything explicitly, was the first in Urdu to touch on female homosexuality and women’s sexual frustration in an aristocratic household. Chughtai was charged with obscenity by the colonial government and tried in Lahore in 1944, at the same time as Manto was tried for “Bū”. Both were acquitted, as nothing explicitly obscene could be shown. Chughtai later wrote, in her memoir, about the trial with humour, and about how the story followed her all her life, overshadowing her other work.

Ṭeṛhī Lakīr

Ṭeṛhī Lakīr (“The Crooked Line”, 1943), often compared to Jane Eyre and A Portrait of the Artist, follows Shaman, a girl born into a large, decaying middle-class Muslim family, through childhood, a boarding school, adolescence, love affairs, education and a disastrous marriage to an Englishman, in a search for selfhood and independence. It is a frank, psychologically searching novel of a woman’s growth and rebellion, and a portrait of a society in transition before independence.

Other works

Chughtai’s stories range from the comic to the tragic. “Chauthī kā Joṛā” (“The Wedding Suit”) is a heartbreaking story of a poor widow and her daughters trying to arrange a marriage for the elder, Kubra, who dies unmarried. “Gharvālī” (“The Housewife”) tells of a maid who becomes her master’s lover and loses everything when he marries her. “Do Hāth” (“Two Hands”) and “Gainda” show her social range. Her short novel Ziddī (“Stubborn”, 1941) and Masūmā (1962) and Ek Qatra-e-Khūn (1975), a novel about the martyrdom at Karbala, followed. Her memoir, Kāghazī Hai Pairahan (“The Paper-Thin Garment”), and her sketch “Dozakhī” — a famous portrait of her brother Azim Beg Chughtai — are classics of Urdu non-fiction.

Style

Chughtai’s prose is utterly distinctive: fast, colloquial, sardonic, full of the idioms, jokes, curses and proverbs of women’s speech in the zenana — a register that earlier Urdu writers had regarded as unliterary. She described women’s lives and bodies from inside, with humour and anger, and without sentimentality.

Legacy

Chughtai is now recognised as one of the founders of feminist writing in South Asia. Her stories are widely translated (by Tahira Naqvi and others) and adapted for stage and film — Lihaaf (2019), plays by Naseeruddin Shah’s Motley group. Google honoured her with a Doodle in 2018.

In conversation

• Liḥāf — “the quilt”: what respectable society hides and refuses to name.
• Ṭeṛhī Lakīr — “the crooked line”: a woman’s life that refuses to run straight along the path laid out for her.
• Begumātī zabān — the vivid speech of women at home, which Chughtai made literary.