The ninth child of a family of ten, Ismat Chughtai grew up in a middle-class Muslim family. All her sisters being married, she was raised with her brothers, and was influenced by her brother Azeem Bai Chughtai, an author who introduced her to history, languages, reading the Koran and literature. In an environment and society which consider girls’ education to be useless, even harmful, she must fight to study and make her way out of conventions. She began writing in secret and married filmmaker Shahid Latif against her family’s opinion. She wrote film scripts and some of her work was adapted to cinema, at a time when the relationship between cinema, progressive authors and Urdu literature was really fertile. Considered both the great woman and enfant terrible of Urdu literature, she was above all the pioneer, with Qurratulain Hyder, of Urdu women’s writing. Published in 1943, her short story “The Quilt” tells, through the naive and lively eyes of a 9-year-old child, the story of a woman, who, abandoned by her husband, finds emotional and sexual comfort with a servant. Notoriety then occurred at the same time as controversy: prosecuted for obscenity – her trial lasted 2 years – she was subject to very violent attacks. With stubborn energy and an intense desire to defend the dignity of women in their individual uniqueness, she reveals the world from behind the veil. Her writing draws from her memories, from the stories told, from the conversations she heard as a child, from the voluble feminine universe of Muslim homes. Her sensitivity is direct, sometimes brutal, which does not exclude tenderness or humour. She shows the self-sufficiency, complacency, complexities and contradictions of her community, the hypocrisy of an oppressive patriarchal system with its unexpected slots of freedom, the weight of sexuality and inhibitions, rivalry, and the dramas between women within a confined universe. Female characters abound: little girls and young widows, grandmothers and sisters-in-law, mothers reduced to their role as “genitrix”, frustrated housewives, abandoned women, former beauties who have become obese, passionate servants and nannies, young girls curious about love and sexuality. The women in her fictions often have the same rebellious and intrepid nature as the author, such as Shaman in “Terhi Lakîr” (“the twisted line”), who was confronted with the social norms and cultural conventions of the time. Her work is also formally innovative. The use of first-person in her short stories projects the reader into a present, in direct contact with consciousness and temporality. Her writing transcribes the begâmâtî zabân, or distinctive language of the women of the Muslim community around the cities of Aligarh and Jodhpur, a type of Urdu, known for its idiomatic expressions, vibrant and colourful metaphors and refined diction. She also transcribes the truculent, free and spontaneous language of the servants. With the talent of a storyteller, she speaks to us by combining irony, play, abruptness and seduction.
