The Free Radical

 

“Puzzled, I stare at the skein not knowing which end I should pull so that one strand comes out untangled, and with its help I could fly beyond the horizon, reaching out like a kite.”

—Ismat Chughtai, ‘Chhoti Aapa’

 

Ismat Chughtai is probably one of the most polarising figures to have appeared in Urdu fiction. Her arrival in the 1940s can be considered as a watershed in the history of women’s writing and the Indian feminist movement in general. Among her contemporaries—be it Rajinder Singh Bedi, or Manto or Krishan Chander—she acquired a position of respect and difference because of her avant-garde treatment and presentation of the female sensibility. This is, however, not to suggest that there is a unitary experience across hemispheres, an anubhav of being a female which is unilateral and didactic. In fact, it is subjective, fluid and deeply personal.




A cursory historical study would demonstrate that Chughtai’s style and ethos of writing can be traced back to the Angaare group with noted personalities like Sajjad Haider, Ahmed Ali, Rashid Jahan and Mahmuduzzafar. Somehow, their form of writing had a shock value attached to it. They managed to challenge the socio-political morals that dominated contemporary society.

Ismat was not much different. However, to canonise her as a beacon of Urdu writing would be to undermine her own view on the matter, which focused less on the point of glorifying authorship and more on the art of telling what she felt. In fact, when she started writing, people thought that the pieces were by her brother Azim Beg Chughtai.

Chughtai’s prose, in her own words, wasn’t “literary”. There was an absence of the predatory influence of intellectual narcissism on artists.

Chughtai’s views on authorship and the celebrity status given to writers in today’s world makes for an interesting comparative study. Chughtai’s prose, in her own words, wasn’t “literary”. There was an absence of the predatory influence of intellectual narcissism on artists.

The sheer challenge to this hegemonical tradition of “literariness” was posed through a careful admission of the oft-ignored spoken language. Short sentences, often syntactically wrong, grammatically incorrect but unapologetically personal. The reader is invited into the private world of the author, as she unravels her own experience of being an Urdu feminist writer in a social space dominated by men.

This obsession with the spoken language wasn’t just because she wanted to reach a wider audience. That was evident but also because, in her own admission, her school’s medium of instruction was English and so Urdu was in some ways neglected.

Her family celebrated frankness in speech and action. Chughtai grew up climbing trees, riding horses and doing everything that was considered not permissible and indecent for a woman.

Her family celebrated frankness in speech and action. Chughtai grew up climbing trees, riding horses and doing everything that was considered not permissible and indecent for a woman. They discussed sex and pregnancy-related issues, which were a taboo in Muslim households back then. This discursive framework formed the distinct sensibility that we identify with Chughtai.

 

The stories associated with Chughtai further the enigma surrounding her even today. It is reported that her process of writing was unique too. She put on the radio, took some pieces of ice, chewed them slowly as her pen made progress on the sheet.

Her camaraderie with Manto is well-known, even to the point that people used to ask them repeatedly in seminars and meetings about the prospect of marriage between them. Manto’s stories were vulgar for her, full of “dirty words”. In her opinion, ‘Thanda Ghosht’ was horribly written, if clever, story that had no symbolic value whatsoever. This is a woman whose life broke stereotypes in actual practice, and not just in the social imaginary of her books.

Her process of writing was unique too. She put on the radio, took some pieces of ice, chewed them slowly as her pen made progress on the sheet.

For months she wouldn’t write something and suddenly an avalanche of words and narratives would make its way into her mind and she would forget about eating or bathing or even sleeping. There was such haste in her actions, which got translated even when she was cooking food. But sewing was an exception. It calmed her, neutralised the childlike briskness that accompanied her art.

However she wasn’t a woman without contradiction. Somehow perplexed by the violent reaction to Lihaaf, she admits in an interview that the obscenities that were hurled at her through letters written by readers forced her to become more cautious about her use of words. She even goes to the extent of apologising for writing Lihaaf. And then after two sentences she comes back with a bang: “I am not afraid of talking any non-sense.” Whether that was deliberately ironised is a debate for another time, but what I am trying to stress through these instances is that Chughtai was as much a product of her times as she was the progenitor of those troubled times.

She could talk on and on about how Rashid Jahan influenced her style and manner of speaking, how she still occupied a position of the outsider in the progressive writers movement simply because, in today’s lingo, she was too hot to handle. She represented the curious meeting point of variant trends in the movement itself. There was an embedded humanism and that somehow clashed with the communist ethos that developed in the 1930s and ’40s.

Ismat occupied a position of the outsider in the progressive writers movement simply because, in today’s lingo, she was too hot to handle. She represented the curious meeting point of variant trends in the movement itself.

Her generalisation about poets being unavoidably emotional and connoisseurs of fiery sentences, which often leave the reader wanting a dollop of realism, is rather poor understanding of the ethos of poetry. She couldn’t be more wrong in this regard; a rich tradition of Communist poets in Latin America and otherwise stand testament to the baselessness of this serious accusation.

What I am trying to achieve through its discussion is to demonstrate how Chughtai played with and finally reformulated the discipline of female writing in general and the role and social positioning of the public intellectual. The intellectual in Chughtai makes a conscious political attempt to lessen the gap between theory and praxis, between cultural mobility and structural decadence, between form and fiction, between style and substance. Her writings include all these minor anxieties and struggles that accommodate these positions.