How Long Can A River Be Held Back By A Dam?

One of Indian literature’s most radical and important voices, Ismat Chughtai broke the confines of language and genre, writes Aamer Hussein.

When I saw that tiny collection with her name on the spine on a public library shelf, I couldn’t help being curious. Ismat Chughtai was a friend of my aunt’s; she liked to listen to my mother sing Rajasthani folksongs, and I’d seen her in a film, Junoon. I’d heard a funny story about how when someone rang her up to ask how she was, she’d said: “jhadu de rahi thi [I was sweeping]”. I’d also plodded through a story by her, ‘Nanhi ki Nani’, for an Urdu exam, along with stories by Krishen Chandar, Manto and Premchand. I found the Progressives dull, and hadn’t found her story particularly distinctive.




But it was 1988 now, I was about to publish my first story that week, and the title of the book, Adhi Aurat Adha Khwab, was intriguing. I started to read the first story, ‘Meri Aap Beti’. The imagery of the opening passages was enchanting—a child dancing in a hall of mirrors, which turns out to be her mother’s womb; the same girl child, slightly older, riding her brothers’ white mare in a garden. But it was the prose that captivated me: lucid, direct, unadorned. Her voice was intimate, confidential, irreverent—I hadn’t read anything quite like it before in any language.

I checked out the book and read it all the way home, probably missing my stop. It was about a child growing into a woman who doesn’t want any chains. She chooses to study rather than to marry, and when she does find a partner he is someone she sees and treats as an equal and a companion. The story was written with such a light touch that its message was implicit rather than loud. It was obviously an autobiography, but Chughtai’s seemingly random selection of details made it universal. Even her writing career was dismissed in a couple of phrases. Looking at the collection now, I see I read quite a few of the stories and essays in it—some very good—but I don’t think there was anything else there that captivated me quite as much as ‘Meri Aap Beti’.

It was the prose that captivated me: lucid, direct, unadorned. Her voice was intimate, confidential, irreverent—I hadn’t read anything quite like it before in any language.

In April, I was in Rome, waiting on a rainy Sunday for a friend to come and pick me up, and I started to write a story. The setting was a Karachi childhood, and I suddenly found myself writing with a new simplicity I’d discovered in my mother tongue that made me bold enough to try to recapture its cadences in English.

It wasn’t until November that year that I returned to Ismat’s work. In a few days, I read four books, long and short: Ziddi, Dil ki Duniya, Tedhi Lakeer and Ik Qatra-e-khoon. Ziddi was an almost Gothic romance about the love affair of a servant with her master’s son. It ended in a melodramatic sequence in which Asha, the heroine, set herself and her lover’s corpse on fire. Chughtai wrote it in her early 20s. She could have written a routine potboiler; I knew it had been filmed with Dev Anand and Kamini Kaushal. But the novella was written in a prose that sang, entirely different from any of her stories, perhaps even more compelling. The only comparison I could make was with the early work of Toni Morrison, who must have been eight when Chughtai published her book—that oracular voice, which didn’t comment or explain, but studded the narrative with poetic observations:

The weather never ceases to toy with humans. In summer you feel like jumping into a sea of ice, and if someone speaks to you, you can do little more than snap back…scorching heat, a dull ache, and without a fan a feeling that you’re simmering slowly. And if the fan is turned on, your head swims. Oh God! And winter? Lethargy, lassitude, cold, cold, everything so cold. Even the heart turns cold. When spring arrives, everything blooms, all that has been lying dormant, stirs. For no reason at all you feel mischievous and playful, tickled by a strange restlessness. And then comes Holi and it’s as if a volcano had erupted. If Holi didn’t come around this year, this heart would break out of its cage in frenzied madness. How long can a river be held back by a dam? Only so long as the dam can hold. But why hold back in the same place?

Even in this early work, the twin oppressions of class and gender are embedded in the text, and from the quotation above, her agenda is already visible—the constant struggle between freedom and the cages and chains that society and the superego create to hold back the heart (her metaphor for creative energy) in the same place.

Ismat later said that when she began she was somewhat under the influence of the romantic novelist Hijab Imtiaz Ali, and this first novel is, indeed, about uncontrolled passion. She would soon come under the influence of Rashid Jahan, the communist doctor and short story writer; in later years, she’d say she moved her focus from sex to class, from Freud to Marx. I’d say that even in this early work the twin oppressions of class and gender are embedded in the text, and from the quotation above, her agenda is already visible—the eruption of a volcano, the damming of a river—the constant struggle between freedom and the cages and chains that society and the superego create to hold back the heart (her metaphor for creative energy) in the same place.

 

That unstoppable urge for freedom was never more powerfully expressed than in her magnum opus Tedhi Lakir, which I also read that week in November. In many ways, ‘Meri Aap Beti’ covers the same ground—a young girl’s struggle to break away from her chains—but here, in this early work from the mid-1940s, Ismat has absorbed all her literary influences and, even more significantly, the lived experiences of her life, to create a radical novel that examines nationalist and feminist issues in the framework of a bildungsroman. Ismat’s artfulness is manifest in her choices: Shaman, the heroine, many of whose educational and existential decisions closely reflect Ismat’s, never becomes a writer as her creator did. Also, unlike Ismat, she has a disastrous marriage with an Anglo-Irishman.

Feminist critics have rightly pointed out Chughtai’s trailblazing analysis of the feminist condition and how her novel is a fictional forerunner of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. I can’t, however, think of any other feminist novel of the time of quite the same calibre. Its analysis of India’s role in World War II and the lead-up to Independence is powerful and prescient. But it’s also a great work of art. Chughtai uses the symbolist technique she first used in Ziddi to astonishing effect, intertwining political events with personal histories, notably in her depiction of the wider world at war:

The heat was at its maximum. It seemed as if the sun had lost its way and was slowly coming closer. Germany had incinerated France. Spreading its wings wide, the Nazi eagle has swooped over the lovely lady who carried the banner of freedom for centuries, the goddess of art and literature. Free France left the enslaved France sobbing in the Nazi jungle and took refuge in England…

How nice it would be if this beloved son, this treasure of England, this Hindustan, could also be free from its mother’s lap and breathe the air of freedom; thus a liberated Hindustan would be born in one of its corners…

But these simple illiterates have another characteristic. They tire quickly of one master and, when their noses are thinned on one side from rubbing as they worship, they turn towards another god in order to breathe. That is why their noses are so sharp. They haven’t the slightest idea what will happen if the German wheel turns. Unending oppression has made them completely fearless. They don’t know that Germany is bombing Britain. So used to peace, how will they endure this conflagration? What will happen to them when they discover that the world is not just comfortable rooms, it is also the sun’s blaze, the chill of ice, and gusts of wind?

Feminist critics have rightly pointed out Chughtai’s trailblazing analysis of the feminist condition and how her novel is a fictional forerunner of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.  I can’t, however, think of any other feminist novel of the time of quite the same calibre.

Chughtai’s excoriating satire of the indolence of the colonised disguises a huge compassion for the state of the nation. Tedhi Lakeer is rightly considered one of the three best novels in Urdu. Never again, though, would she deploy the enormous sociopolitical canvas of this work; instead, she returned again and again to the intimist scale with which she was most comfortable, and turned the cold eye of her fiction away from the Uttar Pradesh of her formative years to the fleshpots of the Bombay film industry, in which she herself was involved. But in the ’70s, she published an uncharacteristic work Ik Qatra-e-Khoon, a novel-length prose retelling of Mir Anis’s classic Marsiyas—elegies for the Prophet’s grandson, martyred at Karbala in a war of justice along with his family and followers—seemingly aimed at young adults. In her brief foreword, she writes (my translation):

This is the story of the 72 humans who, in the service of human rights, collided with imperialism.
This 1,400-year-old story is the story of today.
For today, too, Man’s worst enemy is called Man.
And today, too, Man is the flagbearer of humanity.
Today, too, when a Yazid arises in some corner of the world, a Husain advances to twist his wrist.
And today, too, light conquers the darkness.

Even at 61, Chughtai had not set aside her socialist and humanist ideals, and transformed a religious epic into a parable for her times. But that was later. In the early ’60s, between her fictions about Bombay, she found time to return to her childhood world in one of her most graceful, tender and perfectly calibrated works, Dil ki Duniya. Though her trenchant wit is unabated in her portrait of a young abandoned woman’s escape from domestic captivity into an illicit happiness, contrasted with the story of another free soul’s slow disintegration in confinement, she approaches her material with a fresh and gentle humour gained from hindsight and distance.

What Qurratulain Hyder and Abdullah Hussain are to the Urdu novel, and Manto, Ghulam Abbas and Intizar Hussain to the short story, Chughtai is to the novella.

This novella, narrated in the first person from a child’s point of view, flashes forward to an unexpectedly happy ending recounted by the protagonist’s daughter. Chughtai is at her very best. And I’ll risk saying that she, though best known for her short stories, takes the wreath as Urdu’s undoubted master of that elusive form, the long story or short novel, which covers the ground of long fiction with a short story writer’s deft sprint. What Qurratulain Hyder and Abdullah Hussain are to the Urdu novel, and Manto, Ghulam Abbas and Intizar Hussain to the short story, Chughtai is to the novella.

I read Tedhi Lakeer and Dil ki Duniya concurrently. It’s hard to say which moved me most—if Tedhi Lakeer impressed me with its boldness, range and its credentials as a major novel, the influence of the later, tiny work would linger with me forever, and I’d find its thematic and stylistic echoes in my own stories from time to time for years to come. When I finally switched to writing in Urdu in my fifties, I could say that Chughtai’s fictions were the first of the crooked lines that took me back to my mother tongue.

 

In 1990, I was in Bombay after eight years, and asked my aunt about Ismat. She was ailing, my aunt said, and reclusive. I didn’t ask to see her. At the end of that year, I heard to my delight that the Women’s Press was about to publish a selection of her stories, The Quilt, which included her classics, the title story and the almost equally famous ‘The Wedding Shroud’, along with stories I hadn’t read in the original.  And in 1992, shortly after the collection’s appearance, Chughtai died. She’d suffered for a while from Alzheimer’s. It was to be another four years before The Crooked Line was to be published in translation.

It’s hard to say which moved me most—if Tedhi Lakeer impressed me with its boldness, range and its credentials as a major novel, Dil ki Duniya’s influence would linger with me forever, and I’d find its thematic and stylistic echoes in my own stories from time to time for years to come.

Today, most of Chughtai’s oeuvre, like that of her sometime rival Qurratulain Hyder, is widely and easily available in translation, thanks to the dedicated editorship of Ritu Menon. It’s said that when Chughtai was awarded a major prize in her last years she was dismissive of the honour and felt it had come too late. I wonder how she’d react if she knew that, in her centenary year, she’s broken the confines of language and genre, and is acknowledged as one of Indian literature’s most radical and important 20th-century voices.