Few authors have blasted open the doors of convention as forcefully as Ismat Chughtai (1915-1991). In doing so, she brought to life stories seldom heard outside the zanana. Her unabashed, often risqué style of writing fetched her much notoriety in her lifetime, but today she is adulated as a radical voice well ahead of her times.
One of the four pillars of the modern Urdu short story, along with Saadat Hasan Manto, Krishan Chandar, and Rajinder Singh Bedi, Chughtai has become enshrined in the canon of Indian literature. Yet, even twenty-six years after her death, her primary identity remains that of a pioneer of women's fiction.
This collection of writings on Chughtai, a hundred years after her birth, curates critical readings of her by modern scholars as well as her contemporaries. Read along with her interviews, where she speaks her mind in her own inimitable style on a range of thorny issues from lesbianism to communism, these writings offer a more holistic way of understanding Chughtai beyond narrow gender terms-as a politically aware and socially engaged writer, a champion of individual liberty, and, ultimately, an artist concerned with humanity.
Rakhshanda Jalil is a writer, critic, and literary historian.
I am deeply grateful to Geeta Patel for allowing me to use the title of her essay 'Ismat Chughtai: An Uncivil Woman', published in the Annual of Urdu Studies, Chicago-Wisconsin, Volume 16, 2001, pp. 345-55, as the title of this volume. I am also grateful to Geeta Patel for sending me her essay, 'Disorderly Discernments...', which she had presented in a much abbreviated form at SOAS London under a different title-'Sending the Zanana on a Railway Journey' in May 2012. I must also acknowledge the kindness of Dr Carlo Coppola for allowing me to reproduce his interview with Ismat for Mahfil, A Quarterly of South Asian Literature, 8, 2-3, Summer-Fall 1972, pp. 169-88, Asif Farrukhi for allowing me to use his interview with Ismat for The Herald, Karachi, April 1985, pp. 115-18, and Tahira Naqvi for giving permission to use two of her essays published on the occasion of Ismat's birth centenary in The Wire and Kindle. I am grateful to the editors of The Wire and Kindle for giving permission to use these essays. I also want to acknowledge, with much gratitude, each of the translators for their immaculate translations from the Urdu originals.
Ismat Chughtai (1915-1991)-one of the most provocative and rebellious writers in Urdu-wrote voluminously till she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1988. Her formidable body of work comprises five collections of short stories, seven novels, and three novellas, alongside several sketches, plays, reportage, and radio plays. This is not all. She also wrote stories, dialogues, and scenarios for 14-15 films produced by her husband Shahid Latif and others. Much of her non-film writing was autobiographical, if not directly related to her own life, it stemmed from her experiences as a woman, especially a middle- class Muslim woman. Having said that, Ismat was not writing for women alone, nor was she writing just about women. Yes, she was using a woman's tongue. Yes, she was quick to see the inequality meted out to women in an essentially unequal world. And, yes, she was more adept than other writers of her time at faithfully and accurately opening a window into the real, lived lives of flesh-and-blood women.
As we celebrate Ismat Chughtai's centenary, and look at her critically and objectively, it is important also to consider whether, and to what extent, her persona overshadows the literary merit of her work. For Ismat is a perfect example of how a politically aware, socially engaged writer, one who was actively involved in the powerful literary grouping known as the Progressive Writers' Association (PWA), who saw herself as a progressive writer in the long tradition of the medieval Bhakti poet Kabir, whose self-image was clearly that of a writer who was concerned with humanity, social awareness, and humanism, yet, who is when all is said and done-still viewed through the prism of women's writings. I have studied and written about Ismat in my previous work.
on the Progressive Movement, though it was a brief cameo in a larger study of the Progressive Writers' Movement (PWM).2 That too is interesting. I ask myself; why was somebody who was at the heart of the movement, someone who lived in Bombay during the high noon of the glory days of the PWM and was friends with almost all the stalwarts of the Progressive Movement, who, despite her differences with the core group of ideologues, never strayed from the progressive path, why did she not occupy a larger role in my study? While I will come to Ismat and the progressive writers in more detail in the course of this introduction, I do want to clarify at the very outset that though I read a great deal of Ismat in those years, when I got down to writing about the history of the movement, she did not occupy more than a few pages ... four-and-a-half to be precise. Her name cropped up repeatedly, but in terms of actual space, I found myself unable to devote more than a small sub-section. Why was that? This question has long troubled me. Editing this volume of critical writings on Ismat is, to some extent, an attempt to make amends, and to redress a wrong.
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