Writer Ismat Chugtai, best known for her controversial work Lihaaf, would have turned 110 today. Khushbu Kirti describes the influences that shaped her and came forth in her writing
In the 1920s, when women all around the world were still struggling for suffrage and basic rights, a Muslim woman — who was one of a dozen competitive siblings — did not exactly have an easy life. But maybe, it was Ismat Chugtai’s background that laid the foundation for her rise as one of the foremost feminists that India has produced. Most stories by the novelist, who would have turned 110 today, have a touch of hilarity but the readers can fathom the depths of pain she is hiding. She was reprimanded, proscribed from voicing her curiosity and beaten by elders, as a child and Chugtai pens her bitter experiences of a childhood in her story Bachpan.
Born in an upper-middle-class Muslim family in Badaun, Uttar Pradesh, she was jostling for space and attention alongside her six brothers and three sisters. The first woman writer to explicitly and boldly cover unspoken themes of class conflict, female sexuality and femininity, Chugtai practised what she preached and lead a life which was an impeccable example.
She confessed in one of her works, “I considered femininity as a sham, and worked upon compromise as falsehood, patience as cowardice, and gratitude as duplicity.”
Being the daughter of a civil servant, her family often relocated (Jodhpur, Agra, and Aligarh), thus, enabling her to explore a wide range of characters and mindsets. When she was young, she observed how people were treated differently, that there was a stark difference between a servant and a master, that the servants bore the brunt of the master’s fault, which was always the case. She understood that the world revolved around complex power dynamics, that the rich always won, and similar was the struggle between men and women — that men were considered the superior race and subjugated women for their selfish means, and that the society was interpellated to believe that this was the way of the world. The women themselves were perpetrators of patriarchy. In her case, it was her mother who did not want her to study further, did not let her speak her mind and wanted her to marry at a young age. The imprint that the incident left on her mind was brought forth in Chowthi Ka Joda where Bi Amma, the mother of Kubra is obsessed with marrying off her daughter — because she needs to get rid of the paraya dhan — and treating the son-in-law, a ludicrous, skanky fellow, like a demi-God. Besides her mother, she openly disliked her dogmatic Urdu teacher Mullaniji. This became the grounding of her most puissant works that show a Marxist bent of mind while exposing patriarchy and lopsided power play.
The Padma Shri awardee expressed her life events as interesting episodes in her autobiography Kagazi Hain Pairhan (English - A Life In Words). As an aspiring writer and a woman still living in an authoritarian and patriarchal world, the work inspired me to a degree I cannot explain in mere words. The work had a revolutionary zeal and engenders into the reader a new blazing hope, ceaseless energy and complete awe for the woman who — in a loosely constructed narrative and the most interesting accounts of her life — indites her story of fighting for education, battling with the world for choosing the person she loves and wanting to be with and for living life on her terms. Chugtai speaks for women’s rights, voices her relative’s concerns regarding khula (women’s right to divorce in Islam), speaks emphatically for equality — whether that is between wealthy and the poor, or women and men — highlights religious discrimination and the evident gap between Hindus and Muslims.
In her memoir, she narrates how, as a child, her best friend Sushi (from a Hindu household) and her family celebrated Janmasthmi. She mentions that despite close professional and personal ties, on Hindu festivals, the Muslim kids were locked in their houses and on Islamic holidays, the Hindus were nowhere to be seen. The two communities avoided each other like plague, and only wished each other formally. On this specific day, Chugtai trespassed her boundaries and landed up at Sushi’s house. She was always intrigued by the Bhagwan’s room which she was never allowed to enter on other days. This secret room, out of the reach of people of other communities, piqued the curiosity of little Chunni and she escaped from everyone’s vision, into its enclosure. What she saw enticed the little kid and she couldn’t stop herself from embracing the baby idol of a shining Krishna. She had absolutely no clue of who this little statue was but merely adored the baby. However, she was caught instantly and hell broke loose at both the houses. She was taught that idol worship was a sin when she did not know what an idol was. Though Sushi’s parents forgave the child for the sake of their old relations, as Chugtai mentions, this could have been a sufficient reason for sparking Hindu-Muslim riots.
Being an active member of the Proggresive Writers’ Movement, Chugtai was associated with great writers like Rashid Jahan, Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, Saadat Hasan Manto, etc. She swiftly transitioned from writing short stories and novels to scripts and was one of the few writers who were appreciated in their own age. She wrote popular movies of the day like Garam Hawa, Tedhi Laqeer, Arzoo, and notable stories include Lihaaf (The Quilt), Chhui Mui, Kaliyan, Badan ki Khushbu, and so on.
From jousting for her case at Lahore Court for her story Lihaaf alongside Manto (who was fighting for his controversial story Bu), her experiences as a member of the esteemed Progressive Writers’ Association, her vehement opposition to its inflexibility and orthodoxy, her sane and supportive relationship with her father and brother Azim or Nanhe Bhai, who despite the patriarchal upbringing stand up for her to winning national awards, being internationally acclaimed for bringing on the surface the unspoken truth, Chugtai led an exemplary life.