ISMAT CHUGHTAI Translated from the original Urdu Kaghazi Hai Pairahan by M. Asaduddin PENGUIN BOOKS PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand Penguin Group (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published by Penguin Books India 2012 Copyright © Ashish Sawhny 2012 Translation and introduction copyright © M. Asaduddin 2012 All rights reserved 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 9780670086184 Typeset in Goudy by R. 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For Shamim Hanfi my Urdu mentor Contents Introduction ix Dust of the Caravan 1 In the Name of Those Married Women . 21 Nanhe and Munne 43 Conflict 61 An Incomplete Woman 76 Leaving Aligarh Once Again 95 Chewing on Iron 113 Aligarh 136 Sujat 156 The Golden Spittoon 173 Return to Bareilly 188 Under Lock and Key 205 Women’s Education 219 Hell 239 Light 259 Family Tree 279 Glossary 280 Acknowledgements 282 Introduction Ismat Chughtai (1911–91)1 has remained Urdu literature’s most courageous and controversial writer and its most resolute iconoclast. Appearing on the scene during the heyday of the Progressive Writers’ Movement, which changed the complexion of Urdu literature in significant ways, Ismat remained a progressive in the true sense of the term throughout her life, even though the movement dissipated shortly after Independence in 1947. Among her fellow fiction writers—Rajinder Singh Bedi, Krishan Chander, Saadat Hasan Manto—she was distinguished both by the themes she dealt with and the style she developed to treat them. As the subcontinent’s foremost feminist writer she was instinctively aware of the gendered double standard in the largely feudal and patriarchal structure of the society she lived in and did everything to expose and subvert it. She 1 Scholarship on Ismat Chughtai, both in English and other Indian languages, has remained marred by inaccuracies of dates; the author herself was delightfully sportive about this, and helped little to remove this confusion. Even the basic fact of her birth has been recorded erroneously in many books and articles as 1915, instead of 1911. The first book in English that discusses Ismat Chughtai in a theoretically informed way, i.e. Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence (London and New York: Routledge, 2005) by Priyamvada Gopal also demonstrates this confusion. While the chapter on Ismat Chughtai gives her year of birth as 1915 (p. 68), the appendix records it as 1911 (p. 164). In all fairness, I must admit that I had committed the same mistake initially, but after the current researches on her life and works, particularly after the publication of Ismat: Her Life and Times (New Delhi: Katha, 2000), there is no reason why this error should persist. ix x Introduction lobbied relentlessly—and successfully—to get an education, struggled fiercely to find her own voice and wrote with passion and panache to depict the visible and subtle tyrannies of contemporary society and her conflicts with the values that made them possible. Kaghazi Hai Pairahan (henceforth, KHP), generally known to be Ismat Chughtai’s autobiography, is a curious piece of work. It is certainly written by Ismat Chughtai, and it is about her life, her family and her growth and development as a writer. But it is not a straightforward autobiography inasmuch as it does not record the author’s life story—from her birth to the point of writing the book—in a chronological order. It is fragmented, jagged, written in fits and starts when spurts of memory propelled her to record her reminiscences, without consideration for chronology, repetition or narrative coherence. Perhaps it is not realistic to expect a traditional autobiography from such an individualistic, temperamental and radical writer like Ismat Chughtai, who never moved on a straight or predictable path, much like the heroine, Shaman, of her autobiographical novel, Terhi Lakeer (Crooked Line). The fourteen chapters of KHP, written for the Urdu journal Aaj Kal, were published from March 1979 to May 1980. The general tenor of the chapters and the manner in which they were written is illustrated by the following note from the author to the editor of Aaj Kal when she sent in the second instalment: I’m sending the second chapter. I am trying to record from my memory the events that affected me and what I had heard from conversations in the family, the tensions inherent in every class, new questions and their resolution—all this is so complicated. I will send you whatever gets written at any point of time. Let them be published under different titles. The sequence might be worked out while editing them [for the volume]. The writer did not have the opportunity to take a second look, much less edit what she had written because of other preoccupations Introduction xi and her failing health. It was at the initiative of the editor of Aaj Kal2 that the instalments were put together as they appeared in the journal, where they were published as volumes in Urdu in 1994,3 three years after her death. The editor, at his own initiative, also added the opening chapter, ‘Ghubaar-e-Kaarwaan’, written much earlier in the same journal in a series that went by the same name, in which many Urdu writers reminisced about their writerly lives. This underlines the fragmentary nature of this autobiography and raises significant questions about the motivation and intention of the author and about the notions of authorship, representation, selfhood and subjectivity, the answers to which will help us ‘understand the peculiar tension between public and private realities that underwrites women’s writing’.4 • The span of the volume is limited to the years between when Ismat Chughtai entered high school to the time of writing her controversial story, ‘Lihaaf’. In other words, the autobiography records the events of only a couple of years of her life. Even with the addition of the opening chapter there are silences and gaps that cry out to be verbalized and filled up. However, within this limited timeframe, we find encapsulated vignettes that point to the multiple and richly tapestried cultural matrix that went into developing Ismat Chughtai’s artistic sensibility. The real absence in KHP is any vignette from her married life, even though her husband, Shahid Lateef, figures in many places. One gets just a fleeting glimpse in the chapter, ‘In the Name of Those Married Women . .’ It is a matter of speculation as to why a brutally honest 2 Monthly Urdu magazine, published by the Publications Division, Government of India, Delhi. 3 Ismat Chughtai, Kaghazi Hai Pairahan (New Delhi: Publications Division, 1994). 4 Susie Tharu and K. Lalita, Women Writing in India, Vol. II: The Twentieth Century (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. xvii. xii Introduction and outspoken author like Ismat Chughtai shied away from talking about her married life. Was this reluctance to talk an admission of the failure of her married life? Or did she set herself a limit on how much she would reveal, since some facts are too personal to be chronicled even in an autobiography? Was she exercising her individual freedom to be selective, much as the iconic black feminist writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston had done in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road?5 These questions will tantalize readers as they go through the pages of this volume. • The ‘condition-of-women novel’ began to be written in Urdu, albeit in a reformist mode, as early as the 1870s, much before its emergence in other Indian languages, with the fictional works of deputy Nazir Ahmad6 (1830–1912), and continued through the works of Ahmad’s 5 Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on the Road (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984; originally published in 1942). This was written by the writer, rather reluctantly, at the instance of the publisher. Its reliability and authenticity has often been called into question. Hurston omitted a good part of her life from the text—she did not elaborate on the struggles she faced in her literary career and did not mention her second marriage. And though she chronicled her life from the moment of her birth she does not give a date.