Decoding the 'feminist' in Ismat Chughtai's most (in)famous short story, Lihaaf

Decoding the 'feminist' in Ismat Chughtai's most (in)famous short story, Lihaaf Sadat Hassan Manto, who referred to Lihaaf because the because the "best exceptional tale" Chughtai had written, changed into there too. He became defending his tale, Bu that confronted similar expenses. Published in 1942 in a literary mag - Urdu Adab-i-Latif, Lihaaf or The Quilt, is about inside the household of a Nawab. Chughtai, with her discerning eye for element, writes approximately his virtuousness - "No one had ever seen a nautch lady or prostitute in his residence", his strange hobby - of retaining his residence open for "college students - younger, truthful and narrow-waisted boys whose charges have been borne by way of him", and his negligence in the direction of his spouse, Begum Jan. The tale, narrated through a girl, is in the main acknowledged by her from the time whilst she become a infant and turned into left with Begun Jan through her mom. What follows is the child's documentation of the time spent there - her incomprehension of Begum Jan and her servant Rabbu's friendship, her horror on seeing the cover, utilized by Begun Jan, taking puzzling shapes on the wall at night and her fright whilst Begum Jan asks her, "How many ribs does one have?" and proceeds to discover. "Ismat started out writing at a time when South Asian girls have been nonetheless sequestered and their voices suppressed," writes Farhat Bano in her thesis, The emergence of feminist recognition among Muslim girls the case of Aligarh. Perhaps this accounts for the sort of controversy Chughtai had to court resulting from the story. Much like her other works, Chughtai in Lihaaf unabashedly wrote approximately lady dreams and needs and thereby even mentioned them. Left on my own by way of her husband, Chughtai's protagonist Begun Jan takes charge of her existence and navigates her manner through the bindings of the patriarchal setup to specific her sexual urges and satiate them. But Chughtai locations a lihaaf or a cover of vagueness and euphemism over her writing as she explores the homoerotic theme in her tale. Nothing is ever stated aloud and the ploy of the use of a baby narrator and borrowing her lexicon to recount the story serves Chughtai's cause nicely. Although veiled, the references had been not missed by using the readers. Lihaaf gained Chughtai notoriety as well as the epithet of being an intensive feminist author - nearly setting her subsequent in line to Rashid Jahan, who too had raised the ire of the general population by using writing about the oppression confronted by women. The story, over the years, has emerged as a fitting example of the triumph of feminism and Begum Jan is frequently considered as the champion of it. She is probably secluded in her husband's family however she makes use of the imposed seclusion to her gain. Left by myself in the zenana, she creates a global for herself. Once in there, she is now not on the mercy of the Nawab to placate her urges. She can unhesitatingly voice an "itch"- on which her whole lifestyles revolved- and discover the important means in Rabbu to tend it. And she does. "Although outwardly she (Begum Jan) abides by way of the patriarchal norms and possesses all of the tendencies necessary for a virtuous female in a patriarchal set-up, it's miles inside the zenana that she refuses to give up her desires and goals for sexual satisfaction even if the only way left to her is to fulfil them by resorting to a deviant way of sexual dating," writes Tanvi Khanna in her article, Gender, Self Representation and Sexualised Spaces: A Reading of Ismat Chughtai's Lihaaf, acknowledging Begum Jan's corporation. The zenana then turns into a feminist utopia wherein women appear to be reliant most effective on every different and where goals can be voiced and placated. "It (zenana) will become a space for the expression of subversive dreams below the apparel of normalcy," she provides. "Lihaaf is not a queer-pleasant tale," says Anupama Mohan, Assistant Professor at Presidency University. Mohan, in her argument, departs sharply from the overall frequent reading of the textual content. She has written approximately the identical in an upcoming article. "In order to understand the richness of the text, you need to examine it in its complete potential and now not merely cherry pick," she says. It isn't always tough to wager that analyzing the textual content just as a feminist narrative - one that glosses over the magnificence divisions and the molestation faced by way of the child narrator- is what Mohan refers to as a selective reading. Begum Jan may have created her global in the zenana but enough evidence within the narrative undergo testimony to the reality that it increasingly resembled "the drawing-room door" that the Nawab had opened for the "firm-calved, supple-waisted boys". They might be two extraordinary bodily areas but they reflect each other inside the cause that they serve. "Begum Jaan's self-empowerment needs to be visible in tandem together with her class and sexual domination over Rabbu first, after which over the kid narrator," Mohan says. The relationship that Rabbu has with Begun Jan might be seemingly homoerotic but it isn't equitable. Rabbu is dependant on Begum Jan and is situated in a social stratum a lot lower to hers. Their dating is then corresponding to a transaction as Rabbu is decreased to a couple of fingers and Begum Jan is transformed into a sexual predator, merely feeding on her prey with out reciprocating. "Rabbu's frame is fragmented and is used mainly as a passive toy via Begum Jan" Mohan says. So subsumed is Begum Jan in her preference and the need to satiate them that the only time she indulges the narrator is when the latter "rubs her returned" to lessen her "itch". Begum Jan is bereft of any maternal instincts and sees the narrator simply as a substitute of Rabbu. Her de-formation as a predator is entire when she attempts to molest the narrator, brushing off her age and the fact that the latter become left to her care. This, but, does now not make Lihaaf any much less of a feminist textual content even though it would possibly venture a few widely wide-spread tenets of feminism. Chughtai blurs the lines between the powerful and the powerless untill every resembles the other in their morbidity. "Lihaaf is a textual content that demanding situations a number of the key tenets of a positive form of feminism. For instance, what are we to make of the Begum's transformation right into a sexual predator? Are we to see her "de-formation" as itself a response to her patriarchal domination by the Nawab and with the aid of her instant hyper-conservative milieu? Or would we are saying, considering that we need to name her agential that she's a hero and villain of her own making?" Mohan asks. Reading the textual content merely as a feminist textual content additionally has brought about our misplaced identity of who is the feminist in Chughtai's tale. Mohan believes it isn't Begum Jan but the child narrator who may be deemed be as a feminist . "I assume, the kernel of "Lihaaf's" feminist self-information lies inside the child narrator who, in defiance of her own mom's parenting, can consider an egalitarian, open courting with her brothers and commonplace male friends (in place of handiest "collecting aashiqs" as young women, we're instructed, have been wont to do at her age) and who, even at her most terrified, gathers courage and speaks up ("I spoke with courage, however no one heard me!")". Her defiance consequences in her mother sending her to Begum Jan and the zenana, that became presupposed to empower her, punishes her rather- silencing and pacifying her. "This punishment was a whole lot more excessive than I deserved for combating with my brothers," the narrator says. Much of the relevance of the textual content lies in Chughtai's potential to interweave themes of class, gender and sexuality and face up to a binarised reading. Such a reading is authorized through Mohan. "When read in a multi-dimensional way, Lihaaf yields wealthy dividends for the scholar who desires to pass past the banal assurances of an unreflexive identification-politics and desires to apprehend the approaches in which literature brings alive the complexity of social interrelationships." Chughtai, even as writing about the time she came to recognise about the obscenity claims, had described Lihaaf as "an unwell-fated story" that had grow to be "a supply of torment" for her. While the writer could have been right approximately it being "a supply of torment", the relevance of the textual content indicates how incorrect she turned into about it being "unwell-fated". Dailyhunt https://www.aeriagames.com/user/soongezomb/