Since March 2020, I have been making a concerted effort to learn Urdu. Recently, I took GCSE exams in this beautiful, expressive language. Depending on my result, I aim to pursue an A-level next.

As part of this mission, I meet various friends online each week to read stories from the Rekhta website. I find colloquial Urdu more fun to engage with than the intimidating formal version.

Ismat Chughtai’s chatty writing has thus become a firm favourite. Besides a few tricky Persian words, she wrote in an Urdu closer to Hindi. This reflected the everyday speech of the people of United Provinces (Uttar Pradesh or UP). Her hybrid usage helps me, as I began by learning Devanagari and only later moved to Nastaliq. Rekhta has a clever button for toggling between the two scripts.

Chughtai (1915–1991) was an iconic, iconoclastic pillar of Urdu literature. She left her mark on writing from South Asia and beyond with her pacy storytelling and unflinching exploration of complex themes.

Raised in UP and spending most of her adulthood in Bombay, she grew up as one of 10 children, of whom six were brothers. The next best-known of the siblings was her junior, Azeem Baig Chughtai. A lawyer and satirical writer, he opposed polygamy in defiance of conservative pressures. The family home’s free-thinking, masculine environment was probably one reason Chughtai was a tomboy, like the narrator of her 1942 story ‘Lihaaf’ (‘The Quilt’).

As an author, Chughtai was closely associated with Saadat Hasan Manto. Alongside him, she faced charges of obscenity in Lahore over ‘Lihaaf’, three years after its publication, in 1945. In court, Manto was criticised for using the word ‘bosom’. He’s said to have riposted: “What else did you expect me to call a woman’s breasts — peanuts?” As we’ll see, Chughtai’s own defence hinged on the absence of explicit language in ‘Lihaaf’.

A striking detail in her memoir Kaghazi Hai Pairahan, translated as A Life in Words, is how young she was at the time of arrest. ‘Lihaaf’ was one of Chughtai’s earliest stories. She was a new mother, “cooling the formula” for her “two-month old daughter”, when the Crown’s summons arrived.

Manto and Chughtai were ultimately acquitted, their trial only adding to the authors’ incendiary status in literary circles.

‘Lihaaf’ encapsulates Chughtai’s frank portrayals of women’s constrained lives within domestic settings, reflecting the storied dynamics within joint families. The central character, Begum Jaan, finds that life in the zenana is marked by sexism, loneliness and repression. Her marriage to the nawab is a sham that leaves her yearning for affection and intimacy.

On recovering from her shamefully loveless union, Begum Jaan begins to spend long, sensuous days with her servant and masseuse, Rabbu — much to the jealousy of other maids.

Begum Jaan’s needs had been neglected by her absentee husband, who is only interested in slim-waisted boys. Ironically, the implication of male homosexuality was nowhere near as sensational as the issue of women desiring women. Whereas a man can’t be denied his urges, the woman is doubly oppressed for her gender and queerness.

Unconventional sexuality has its joy and pleasures, with Chughtai adeptly conveying the “itch” of desire among women. The zenana, a space meant to protect and confine, becomes a site of resistance away from prying patriarchs.

However, the writer also conveys a dark side. The liaisons — wealthy Nawab Sahib chasing young men in gauzy shirts and Begum Jaan’s massages from Rabbu — are clearly transactional rather than truly consensual, defined by power and financial imbalances.

As Chughtai wrote in A Life in Words, “Servants have two faces. One they show to the master while kissing his hand and feet. And the other revealed only behind his back while calling him names... There isn’t a class of people more unfortunate and helpless than domestic servants.”

Servants exist to do their employers’ bidding, which includes sexual services. It is hinted that the Nawab makes a pass at Rabbu’s son, causing him to flee the haveli. What’s more, Rabbu’s portrayal is tinged with colourism and casteism, whereas there is praise — which Chughtai ironises — for Begum Jaan’s fair skin.

When Rabbu goes to visit her exiled son, the piqued mistress looks to get her needs satisfied by a child, the story’s narrator. As uncomfortable as this exposure of upper-class selfishness is, what makes for especially hard reading today is the glimpse of child abuse.

We view Begum Jaan and Rabbu’s relationship through the eyes of the unnamed narrator, a girl of about 10. The device enables Chughtai to partially conceal what is going on.

The child does not understand the shadows cast by a shaking quilt on the wall. Often tormented by nighttime terrors (just as young Chughtai had also suffered bad dreams), the girl interprets these shadows with an infant’s literalism as looking like an elephant.

At the story’s denouement, Begum Jaan and Rabbu have reconciled and are back in bed together. We are told: “The elephant somersaulted inside the quilt, which deflated immediately.” Then the girl sees something under the cover that makes her gasp with shock.

The reader is not privy to the sight, and this sweeping under the quilt helped Chughtai’s legal case. If readers infer something smutty, lawyers argued, this is a result of their voluptuary imagination and not the author’s!

Queer sexuality is an intrinsic, albeit scandalous, aspect of domestic life. Yet, lesbianism or bisexuality was a taboo subject at the time, partly a legacy of Victorian moralising. Such desire had been put under wraps, and the British Raj created a further quilting.

Chughtai’s broader corpus revolves around women, their relationships and lived experiences. Her style features direct and detached narration; dark humour; idiomatic, sometimes coarse diction; and a gritty or acidic tone. This economical approach, earthy and zestful, elicited mixed reviews. The response was often tinged with chauvinism about her nonconformity to the winsome ideal deemed appropriate for women writers.

She was especially maligned for the story’s audacious ending, even by her ally Manto. The controversy would overshadow her other work. Yet Chughtai’s ‘Lihaaf’ remains important not only for its content but the conversations it sparked.

Chughtai showed the subtleties of daily life and depicted women as fully human characters. And ‘Lihaaf’ brought out hidden topics from under the quilt, giving elephants in the room an airing.

The columnist is a Professor of Global Literature at the University of York and author of three books.

X: @clarachambara

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 7th, 2024