Women of Letters
Full disclosure: For years, I have been living with Ismat Chughtai. Her books are part of my community of book best friends. There is no way I can get away from my Ismat obsession — either as a reader or as a teacher. So now that that’s out of the way…
Ismat found her place in the sun. She was a writer who could not be overlooked. She was feisty and whimsical with oodles of confidence. Everyone knew not to expect the predictable of her. Her strength lay in knowing with razor-sharp precision just what she was up against — the overwhelmingly gendered structure of society. And she possessed the badass courage to fight it both strategically as well as overtly. It was either a gun held straight to the temple or an arrow shot from behind a bush.
Whether or not Ismat thought of herself as feminist is besides the point. She instinctively operated as one. She wore the eyeglasses of a woman immersed in the this-worldly, possessed a nuanced understanding of every kind of hypocrisy and wrote in her trademark begumati zubaan. She told her stories with empathy, humour and subversive wit.
Secret smile
In her memoirs Kaghazi Hai Pairahan (translated into English by Asaduddin as A Life in Words: Memoirs), she writes:
“Whenever I saw a magnificent palace eaten away by moss sprouting on its walls and grass growing over it pitilessly, in the heart of my hearts I would smile secretly. The power within those insignificant grasses and weeds would overwhelm me.”
Ismat’s writings eat away at social strictures and absurd certainties in the exact same way as moss and weed eat away at that palace — in a pitiless, silently subversive fashion. Not even her most unsympathetic of readers can put his finger on that one thing which makes him see red. Ismat gets away with murder each time as she did in writing ‘Lihaaf’. The story describes the intimate nature of the relationship between Begum Jan (unhappily married to a nawab who has eyes only for young men) and Rabbu, her maid.
This relationship is viewed through the eyes of the narrator, a young girl who is not quite sure what she is seeing. We cannot be sure either what it is that the girl sees taking place under the Begum’s quilt at night for it is left in that deliciously wicked space of the unsaid. And therein lies Ismat’s cleverness. The story earned her the wrath of the conservatives resulting in the slapping of obscenity charges against her and a trial in Lahore. In court, her lawyer argued successfully that the story could not possibly be a corrupting influence because the subject would only be understood by someone who had had a lesbian experience.
Voice of a child
In her memoirs, Ismat takes a far more direct approach, calling out one sacred cow after the other, even the image of ideal motherhood as premised on love and sacrifice. Writing about her own mother, she says:
“We were so many siblings that my mother felt nauseated by the very sight of us. One after another we had tumbled to the earth, pummelling and battering her womb. Suffering endlessly from vomiting and labour pains, she looked upon us as objects of her punishment.”
She also chronicles the hypocritical nature of the relationship between Hindus and Muslims at the time:
“From a young age we were aware that there was some distinction between Hindus and Muslims. Outward profession of brotherhood went hand in hand with discreet caution. If a Hindu was visiting, meat wouldn’t be mentioned, and even sitting at the same table one had to take care not to touch any of their belongings.”
Even her father’s apparent liberalism, she clarifies, was only on principle. In practice, she argues, “girls and boys were equal in the same way as Hindus and Muslims were brothers.”
Ismat’s strength lies in her ability to use the voice of a child, in writing the world as it is, unembellished, naked, embarrassingly true. I think of her writings as lessons in how to occupy space as a woman, how to be that grass, that moss which — who knows — might one day bring it all crashing down.
K. Srilata is a writer and independent scholar who is currently writing verse that re-imagines the Mahabharata.
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