ज़िन्दगीनामा

https://thewirehindi.com/144840/remembering-ismat-chughtai/

Ismat Chughtai (21 August 1915 – 24 October 1991):

An Indian Urdu novelist, short story writer, and filmmaker, beginning in the 1930s, Ismat Chughtai wrote extensively on themes including female sexuality-feminity; class conflict, with a style characterized by literary realism. Undisputedly, she remains to be one the most significant voice in the Urdu literature of the 20th century.

”When I started writing, there was a trend — writing romantic things or writing like a Progressive. When I started to write, people were very shocked because I wrote very frankly […] I didn’t write what you’d call “literarily.” I wrote and do write as I speak, in a very simple language, not the literary language.”

—Chughtai on her early writings, in a 1972 interview with Mahfil.

Chughtai received her primary education at Women’s College, Aligarh Muslim University, and graduated from Isabella Thoburn College. She was also associated with Progressive Writer’s Association where she met her inspiration, Rashid Jahan, in 1936, one of the leading female writers involved with the movement, who, also was credited for inspiring Chughtai to write “realistic, challenging female characters”. 

Chughtai wrote a drama entitled Fasādī (The Troublemaker) for the Urdu magazine Saqi in 1939, which was her first published work. Following that, she started writing for other publications and newspapers. Some of her early works included Bachpan (Childhood), an autobiographical piece, Kafir (Infidel), her first short-story, and Dheet (Stubborn), her only soliloquy among others.

Chughtai’s first novella Ziddi, which she had written on her early twenties was first published in 1941.

1942-60:

After completing her graduation, Chughtai worked as headmistress of an Aligarh-based Girls school, where she met and developed a close friendship with Shaheed Latif. She continued to write short-stories as Gainda and Khidmatgaar and the play Intikhab. In 1942, she moved to Bombay in 1942.

It was her short-story ”Lihaaf”, that garnered widespread attention, which appeared in 1942 issue of Adab-i-Latif, a Lahore-based literary journal. For which, she was summoned by the Lahore High Court, in 1945, to defend herself against the charges of “obscenity”, drawing a lot of media and public attention. Regardless, she detested the media coverage of the whole incident, which in her view weighted heavily upon her subsequent work;

“[Lihaaf] brought me so much notoriety that I got sick of life. It became the proverbial stick to beat me with and whatever I wrote afterwards got crushed under its weight.

Chughtai’s quasi-autobiographical novel Tedhi Lakeer (The Crooked Line) was released in 1943. She was pregnant with her daughter during the time. She recalled the difficult circumstances facing her during her work on the novel:

“[It was] during the war that I wrote my novel Terhi Lakeer, a big, thick novel. I was sick then, pregnant with my daughter. But I was always writing that novel”. The book chronicles the lives of the Muslim community, women in particular, in the backdrop of the final decades of the British Raj. Chughtai’s exploration of the “inner realms of women’s lives” was well received by critics who variously described her work in Tedhi Lakeer as “probing and pertinent” and “empowering”.

In fact, she said, she found inspiration from the small incidents that she would witness around her and even the personal conversations that took place amongst the women in her family, “I write about people I know or have known. What should a writer write about anyway”?

Her stint in the Hindi Film Industry (1940’s & 1950’s):

In the years following their marriage, Latif, who was himself a dialogue writer, introduced Chughtai to the Hindi film industry. She began writing scripts in the late 1940s and made her debut as a screenwriter for Latif’s drama film Ziddi, followed by writing dialogue and screenplay for the 1950 romance drama film Arzoo. By 1953, she also directed Fareb.

Soon, she and Latif co-founded the production company Filmina. Her first project as a filmmaker was the 1958 drama film Sone Ki Chidiya, which she wrote and co-produced.  Also in 1958, Chughtai produced romance drama, Lala Rukh.

Chughtai continued writing short-stories during the time despite her commitment to film projects, with her fourth collection of short-stories Chui Mui (Touch-me-not) released in 1952.

1961-90

Beginning in the 1960s, Chughtai wrote a total of eight novels, the first of which was Masooma (The Innocent Girl), published in 1962. Her next work, in 1966, Saudai (Obsession) was based on the screenplay of 1951 film Buzdil, which she co-wrote with Latif.

Chughtai, further received significant praise for her fifth novel Dil ki Duniya (The Heart Breaks Free). Reviewing the novel, many observers place it second only to Tedhi Lakeer in the canon of her work. In the early 1970s, Chughtai wrote two novels, Ajeeb Aadmi (A Very Strange Man), based on the life of film actor Guru Dutt and Jangli Kabootar (Wild Pigeons).

Chughtai said of Ajeeb Aadmi: “[In the novel], I go into […] why girls run after him and producers like him, and the hell they make for these men and for their wives. The novel, which was released in the early 1970s, was praised for its bold nature and candour.”

1990s and beyond

In the late 1980’s she was diagnosed with the Alzheimer’s Syndrome, limiting her work, thereafter.

Rakhshanda Jalil quotes one of Chughtai’s conversations with Qurratulain Hyder, a friend and contemporary writer in An Uncivil Woman: Writings on Ismat Chughtai, “I am very scared of the grave. They bury you beneath a pile of mud. One would suffocate […] I’d rather be cremated.”

Following the translation of numerous of her works into English, a renewed interest in the Urdu literature of the twentieth century, and subsequent critical reappraisals, Chughtai’s status as a writer rose.

In a 1993 retrospective piece, Tahira Naqvi also countered the perceived scope of Chughtai’s writings, saying that her work was “neither confined to nor exhausted” by the themes central to Lihaaf: “she had much, much more to offer”. Naqvi, further highlights how despite having established herself as a significant voice in Urdu literature by this time, Chughtai still remained keen on probing new themes and expand the scope of her work.