| KNOW YOUR AUTHORLITERATUREChughtai’s husband, Shaeed Latif,
whom she married in 1941, was a film
director and screenwriter. She brought
her characteristic humour to bear on her
marriage too, saying, in Yahaan se Wahaan
Ta k: “I told Shahid before we got married
that I’m a very troublesome woman, later
on you’ll regret marrying me. I have been
breaking chains all my life. I won’t be
bound in any chain now. It doesn’t suit
me to be an obedient, virtuous woman,
but Shahid didn’t listen to me... the day
before our wedding I warned him again.
There’s still time, listen to me, all our
lives we’ll be friends, I’m saying this as
a friend.” She went on to say, “Shahid
treated me as an equal and that is why
we led a pleasant married life.” Together,
they collaborated on a number of film
projects, such as Ziddi, Arzoo and others.
One of the defining moments in
Chughtai’s life was the Partition of India,
a time when Indians were forced to choose
which nation they wished to belong to.
Like many other writers, Chughtai, too,
was faced with this choice and she decided
(unlike, say, Saadat Hasan Manto who left
for Pakistan) to stay on in India.WRITING HERSELF INTO
CONTROVERSY
In 1942, Chughtai published a short story,
Lihaaf (translated as The Quilt), which
was to propel her into the public eye and
place her at the heart of a controversy that
became a talking point in colonial India.
Lihaaf tells the story of two women, one
a maidservant, and the other, her mistresscharacteristic humour, she was excited
at the prospect of seeing ‘convicts’ in the
jail. Much to her disappointment, the men
behind bars turned out to be a ragtag bunch
of weak and hungry-looking men, not the
ruffian-like dacoits she had imagined.
Roughly around the same time, the Urdu
writer Saadat Hasan Manto, too, was
served a court summons for his story, Bu,
and Chughtai and Manto found themselves
in Lahore for the hearings. She recalls her
excitement at visiting the city that was
‘decked up like a bride’ and spending days
with Manto and her husband, shopping
and partying. At one point, she writes,
her father-in-law wrote to her husband:
“Give dulhan some advice, tell her she
should write something about Allah
and the Prophet so that her afterlife may
be blessed.’ Whether she was given
the advice or not is impossible to tell,
but she continued to write and shock.
Chughtai and Manto fought their cases
in court, turning the courts into a theatre
of delicious comedy, taking apart words
in their works and asking if words like
‘bosom’, or ‘ashiq’ were obscene. In the
end, the case could not be upheld as
no obscene material was found in their
writings. Later, the two writers were
to go their different ways, Chughtai
choosing to stay on in India and Manto
moving to Pakistan.
In time, Chughtai’s writing travelled into
the international world and, today, she is
well known, not only for her fluency of
language and her sensitivity to women,
but equally for the strong women
characters she created, and for the sheer
joy with which she wrote. She garnered
many awards in her life, and created
a new feminist aesthetic, ensuring that
the woman’s voice was heard loud and
clear. In the 1970s, she worked with Kaifi
Azmi on the story of Garam Hawa, a film
that describes the aftermath of Partition
and that became a classic of its time.
Little wonder that her contemporary,
Urdu writer Quratulain Hyder described
her as a ‘female Changez Khan’.Urvashi Butalia is the director and co-
founder of Kali Women, India’s first feminist
publishing house. A recipient of the Padma
Shri award, she is a historian whose research
focuses on the Partition and oral histories. Her
book, The Other Side of Silence, collates the
tales of the survivors of the Partition.who is unloved by her husband, and
describes, through innuendo and skilful
but not explicit use of language, the lesbian
relationship between them. The story is
told from the perspective of a young girl,
who describes what she sees, and the
reader is left to understand the meanings of
what has been described. The story caused
a furore, not only because it transgressed
the ‘norm’ of heterosexual relations but
also because it addressed the issue of class.
At the time, the world of Urdu writing
was dominated by men writing from
a broad left perspective, and many women
writers wrote from within the confines of
the family and patriarchy. Chughtai’s story
was attacked for being obscene, charges
were levelled at the magazine Adab-i-Latif
in which the story had been published,
and a case was filed against her in the
Lahore court. Chughtai herself wrote later
in life that at the time she wrote Lihaaf,
she did not know the meaning of the word
‘lesbian’, that as young women, she and
her friends would talk about these things
without really knowing what they meant.
In her autobiographical writings (Kaghazi
Hai Pehraan), Chughtai describes with
a wonderful touch of humour how she was
mixing baby food for her young daughter
when the police arrived to serve the court
summons. She refused to accept it at first,
and simply laughed, much to the chagrin
of the officers and the consternation of
her husband and a friend who was visiting.
Then, she tried to hand the baby bottle to
the man serving the summons while she
read it. Finally, she read it and asked what
she was required to do: pay a fine or go
to jail, she was told. At the police station
the next day, she found the jails had
space only for male undertrials. So she
asked where they planned to keep her,
a question to which the authorities had no
answer. But, as she describes it with herShe was mixing
baby food for her
daughter, when
the police arrived
to serve the court
summons
94 April 2017
86 April 2017