Half-Women or Half-Dreams? The Lives and Afterlives of Ismat Chughtai’s Women in Pakistan
Raza Naeem*
‘But Gurudev (Rabindranath Tagore) used to say: “O woman you are half woman, half dream!”
Had someone asked for his wife’s opinion, she might have said that Gurudev himself was a total dream as well as the most beautiful interpretation of a dream too!
But “women are not messengers”….. “ women are not prophets”…. “women are not spiritual”.
Then why doesn’t anyone stand up and say that “Women are not women!”’

Ismat Chughtai is regarded as one of the greatest Urdu fiction writers of the 20th Century. While in India, her legacy is being feted and commemorated, in Pakistan, this unrelenting and daring champion of women’s rights and feminism, who anticipated by a few decades the heaven-stormers of the 1960s powered and pioneered in the West by Simone de Beauvoir, has been consciously ignored. Her novel Terhi Lakeer (The Crooked Line) stands out among her six novels with its Joycean heroine ‘Shamman’ (Shamshad) who matures from a precocious, rebellious independent-minded girl to a politically-conscious secular feminist activist involved in the Indian independence struggle. Chughtai’s life and legacy are surprisingly ignored and marginalised by scores of middle-class girls here in Pakistan who are glued to pop-schlock television serials, Bollywood films and increasingly even some contemporary Urdu ‘literature’ as well as Pakistani literature in English, which advocates female submission and stereotyping rather than consciousness-raising and rebellion. 

Not for nothing then are the achievements of courageous icons like the 2014 Nobel Peace laureate Malala Yousafzai, the Oscar-winning film-maker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and the unfortunate Qandeel Baloch scorned and belittled by a section of our own ‘liberal’ elite.  Despite being a known Progressive, critics have also unfairly stereotyped Chughtai as a spokesperson for the respectable women of the Indian Muslim middle-class owing to her unmatched knowledge of the inner lives of the middle-class Muslim zenana (part of a house for the seclusion of women). 

This paper attempts to explore why Ismat Chughtai’s women have lives and afterlives which continue with us into the present and combine strikingly in the persons of Yousafzai, Obaid-Chinoy and Baloch as case studies in both resistance and submission to patriarchy in South Asia in the 21st Century. It also draws upon an original translation of Chughtai’s little-known essays Aurat (Woman) and Heroine, which provocatively lay bare the hypocrisy of the male champions of women’s rights and the myths they have constructed about (our) women; and then proceeds to invent nothing less than a new language for the women of our own time. The paper, thus, links the life and legacy of Chughtai for gender equality in the Indian subcontinent in the 20th Century with the struggles and resistances of three contemporary Pakistani women (in their respective spheres) as role models. 

* Published earlier by the author in Express Tribune 2015, ‘Ismat Chughtai’s Women: Women, yes – Dreams, no’, 29 October, https://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/29986/ismat-chughtais-women-women-yes-dreams-no/.

* Mr Raza Naeem has been trained in Political Economy from the University of Leeds in UK, and in Middle Eastern History and Anthropology from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, USA. He is presently working on three books, namely, a translation of Saadat Hasan Manto’s Letters to Uncle Sam and other essays; a translation of a volume of short stories by Krishan Chander; and a book on the crisis of bourgeois democracy in Pakistan. He is a recipient of the 2013-14 Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship.