Book review: 'A Life in Words: Memoirs by Ismat Chughtai'

A Life in Words: Memoirs by Ismat Chughtai
Translated by M Asaduddin
 Penguin
xxv+281 pages
 Rs499

Women writers across the world have used memoirs, rather than the grand narratives of autobiography, to express their lived reality. In fact, some view the genre as a “female gendered act” that exposes the duplicity of patriarchy and the sub-human, subaltern status accorded to women in male dominated societies.

The case of the memoirs of Ismat Chughtai (1911-1991), a powerful woman’s voice on the horizon of Indian literature, is no different.

Mostly known for her path-breaking stories like ‘Lihaaf’ or ‘Chauthi Ka Joda’, Ismat was castigated by many of her contemporaries and fellow writers as fahaash, or vulgar.

Ignoring these charges, she rather formed an association with other like-minded contemporary iconoclasts like Saadat Hasan Manto to continue her creative journey. She soon became a prominent figure of the Progressive Writers’ Movement. Her memoirs, Kaghazi Hai Pairahan, first published in full in 1994, and now translated as A Life in Words, offers a glimpse into the turbulent and unconventional life of the author who refused to be bogged down by societal norms.

Born in a large upper-middle class Mughal family with eleven children, Ismat was a born rebel as she says, “There’s something in me that militates against putting faith in anyone uncritically...One should first examine all points of disagreement before coming to a consensus.”

She chose to go to school and pursue higher education, unmindful of the disapproval of many members of her extended family who equated education with prostitution. She even manoeuvred a fake marriage proposal from a cousin who wanted a graduate bride in order to seek higher education. She stubbornly refused to embrace parda and protested against women’s segregation. She worked with her husband and companion Shahid Latif, a filmmaker and wrote stories and scripts for a few films including the iconic Garam Hawa.

Ever bold, outspoken, and fun-loving, Ismat also had her moments of weakness, her hidden sufferings, her nightmares and her many liaisons. All these pour out through the meandering memories recorded in her memoirs which capture her life in Agra, Bareilly, Aligarh, Lucknow, Jodhpur and Bombay. The genre allows Ismat the scope to follow the terrains of her furrowed thoughts, combine her head with her heart, even while performing her ‘self’ in a dramatic manner, a quality that brings this work very close to the fictional world of her stories and novels. Thus, if there are funny incidents like when the policemen came to serve her summons to appear in the Lahore Court on account of charges of obscenity, she refused to receive them, insisting that she wanted to see the real jail; there are also accounts of her sufferings at the illness and painful death of her dear brother Azim Beg Chughtai who inspired her to write.

Episodic in nature, the memoirs bring to life many characters like Ismat’s parents, her siblings and cousins, her aunt Bachchu Phuphi (whom everyone called ‘Bichchu Phuphi’ because of her poison tongue), her teachers at Aligarh, Mumtaz Jahan and Rasheed Jahan (of Angaarey fame).

Ismat dissects through the facades of the largely feudal society that she came from with the precision of a surgeon’s knife. Thus, her neighbour and family friend Lalaji’s family creates furore when she touches the silver Krishna on Janmashtami. She satirically ruminates about the ‘ideal Indian woman’ and talks about class-caste configurations among Muslims that played a significant role in marital alliances and relationships. She also expresses her views on religion and culture and her objections to the mixing of the two as she says, “Faith is one thing, the culture of one’s country quite another. I have an equal share in it, in its earth, sunshine and water. If I splash myself with colours during Holi, or light up diyas during Diwali, will my faith suffer an erosion?”

Ismat’s writings are increasingly being recognised in the academia for their ethnographic representation of Muslim women and their complex social reality in twentieth century India, an aspect that has been highlighted in the introduction to this book.  M Asaduddin, who has earlier translated Ismat’s fictional and non-fictional works in his Lifting The Veil and has also written a monograph on Ismat (Sahitya Akademi), has done a commendable job by rendering in English Ismat’s chain of thoughts with all the flavours of the original. Despite a couple of misprints, this lucid translation ensures that the subversive writer of the erstwhile century will reach more and more readers of the present century, a time when resistance is the buzz world. 

Nishat Zaidi is associate professor in the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She can be reached at
nishatzaidi@hotmail.com