Life in Words

Ismat Chugtai

Description

A Life in Words, the first complete translation of Ismat Chughtais celebrated memoir Kaghazi hai Pairahan, provides a delightful account of several crucial years of her life. Alongside vivid descriptions of her childhood years are the conflicted experiences of growing up in a large Muslim family during the early decades of the twentieth century. Chughtai is searingly honest about her fight to get an education and the struggle to find her own voice as a writer. The result is a compellingly readable memoir by one of the most significant Urdu writers of all time.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 15 juillet 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184759402
• Langue: English

Extrait

ISMAT CHUGHTAI

A Life in Words MEMOIRS
Translated from the original Urdu Kaghazi Hai Pairahan by M. Asaduddin
Contents
About the Author
Praise for the book
Dedication
Introduction
Dust of the Caravan
In the Name of Those Married Women . . .
Nanhe and Munne
Conflict
An Incomplete Woman
Leaving Aligarh Once Again
Chewing on Iron
Aligarh
Sujat
The Golden Spittoon
Return to Bareilly
Under Lock and Key
Women s Education
Hell
Light
Footnotes
Introduction
Dust of the Caravan
In the Name of Those Married Women . . .
Conflict
An Incomplete Woman
Chewing on Iron
Aligarh
Return to Bareilly
Under Lock and Key
Women s Education
Hell
Light
Family Tree
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Copyright
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
A Life in Words
Ismat Chughtai (1911-91) was Urdu s most courageous and controversial woman writer in the twentieth century. She carved a niche for herself among her contemporaries of Urdu fiction writers-Rajinder Singh Bedi, Saadat Hasan Manto and Krishan Chander-by introducing areas of experience not explored before. Her work not only transformed the complexion of Urdu fiction but also brought about an attitudinal change in the assessment of literary works. Although a spirited member of the Progressive Writers Movement in India, she spoke vehemently against its orthodoxy and inflexibility. Often perceived as a feminist writer, Chughtai explored female sexuality while also exploring other dimensions of social and existential reality.
M. Asaduddin is an author, critic and translator. His work has been recognized with the Sahitya Akademi Prize, and the Katha and A.K. Ramanujan awards for translation. Among the books he has published are The Penguin Book of Classic Urdu Stories , Lifting the Veil: Selected Writings of Ismat Chughtai , For Freedom s Sake: Manto , Joseph Conrad: Between Culture and Colonialism , and (with Mushirul Hasan) Image and Representation: Stories of Muslim Lives in India . He is currently Professor, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia.
Praise for the Book
Translator M. Asaduddin has . . . done a remarkable job, catching all the nuances of Chughtai s luscious prose and extraordinary wit. This is a book for all to read and enjoy - Hindustan Times
Ismat Chughtai s candid words continue to be contemporary and cutting edge - The Hindu
Asaduddin s work is top-of-the-shelf stuff . . . it transports you to the world of the original . . . If you have not read Chughtai before, this will whet your appetite - Outlook
A youthful Ismat Chughtai jumps exuberantly from every page, outrageously outspoken, courageous, honest and very, very funny . . . there is never a dull moment - Indian Express
These essays showcase the best of Chughtai s range and mastery as a writer-they are erudite, self-aware and always probing . . . [Asaduddin s] work is nimble and nuanced - Time Out
Ismat Chughtai s memoir is a reader-friendly, breezy, almost racy read - Mail Today
The first complete translation of celebrated Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai s Kaghazi Hai Pairahan is a delightful and authentic account of several years of her life - Sunday Standard
Ismat s vivid descriptive style, her rich imagery, her wry humour and a rare ability to look critically at herself, all come together to etch an interesting canvas of an era gone by . . . a must-read for every modern, thinking, liberal Indian woman . . . This book is a compulsive page-turner - Business Line
Breezy and engaging - Business Standard
The book . . . has several gems in the sketches and descriptions . . . And it owes as much to Asaduddin as Chughtai that this is so - Financial Express
The first thing one notices on starting the short story writer, feminist, educationalist and iconoclast Ismat Chughtai s remarkable memoirs, A Life in Words: Memoirs , with due credit to M. Asaduddin s elegant translation, is how utterly unselfconscious, unaffected and natural the writing seems - Mint
This is a fantastic work, so detailed, so sincere, so intensely human - Free Press Journal
A must-read for anyone interested in literature, or for that matter, life - Reading Room
An honest and brilliant description of Ismat Chughtai s life and times - New Woman
[Chughtai s] memoirs are just as radical as her fiction - DNA
Eminently readable . . . superbly translated - Reading Hour
For Shamim Hanfi my Urdu mentor
Introduction
Ismat Chughtai (1911-91) 1 has remained Urdu literature s most courageous and controversial writer and its most resolute iconoclast. Appearing on the scene during the heyday of the Progressive Writers Movement, which changed the complexion of Urdu literature in significant ways, Ismat remained a progressive in the true sense of the term throughout her life, even though the movement dissipated shortly after Independence in 1947. Among her fellow fiction writers-Rajinder Singh Bedi, Krishan Chander, Saadat Hasan Manto-she was distinguished both by the themes she dealt with and the style she developed to treat them. As the subcontinent s foremost feminist writer she was instinctively aware of the gendered double standard in the largely feudal and patriarchal structure of the society she lived in and did everything to expose and subvert it. She lobbied relentlessly-and successfully-to get an education, struggled fiercely to find her own voice and wrote with passion and panache to depict the visible and subtle tyrannies of contemporary society and her conflicts with the values that made them possible.
Kaghazi Hai Pairahan (henceforth, KHP ), generally known to be Ismat Chughtai s autobiography, is a curious piece of work. It is certainly written by Ismat Chughtai, and it is about her life, her family and her growth and development as a writer. But it is not a straightforward autobiography inasmuch as it does not record the author s life story-from her birth to the point of writing the book-in a chronological order. It is fragmented, jagged, written in fits and starts when spurts of memory propelled her to record her reminiscences, without consideration for chronology, repetition or narrative coherence. Perhaps it is not realistic to expect a traditional autobiography from such an individualistic, temperamental and radical writer like Ismat Chughtai, who never moved on a straight or predictable path, much like the heroine, Shaman, of her autobiographical novel, Terhi Lakeer (Crooked Line).
The fourteen chapters of KHP , written for the Urdu journal Aaj Kal , were published from March 1979 to May 1980. The general tenor of the chapters and the manner in which they were written is illustrated by the following note from the author to the editor of Aaj Kal when she sent in the second instalment:
I m sending the second chapter. I am trying to record from my memory the events that affected me and what I had heard from conversations in the family, the tensions inherent in every class, new questions and their resolution-all this is so complicated. I will send you whatever gets written at any point of time. Let them be published under different titles. The sequence might be worked out while editing them [for the volume].
The writer did not have the opportunity to take a second look, much less edit what she had written because of other preoccupations and her failing health. It was at the initiative of the editor of Aaj Kal 2 that the instalments were put together as they appeared in the journal, where they were published as volumes in Urdu in 1994, 3 three years after her death. The editor, at his own initiative, also added the opening chapter, Ghubaar-e-Kaarwaan , written much earlier in the same journal in a series that went by the same name, in which many Urdu writers reminisced about their writerly lives. This underlines the fragmentary nature of this autobiography and raises significant questions about the motivation and intention of the author and about the notions of authorship, representation, selfhood and subjectivity, the answers to which will help us understand the peculiar tension between public and private realities that underwrites women s writing . 4

The span of the volume is limited to the years between when Ismat Chughtai entered high school to the time of writing her controversial story, Lihaaf . In other words, the autobiography records the events of only a couple of years of her life. Even with the addition of the opening chapter there are silences and gaps that cry out to be verbalized and filled up. However, within this limited timeframe, we find encapsulated vignettes that point to the multiple and richly tapestried cultural matrix that went into developing Ismat Chughtai s artistic sensibility.
The real absence in KHP is any vignette from her married life, even though her husband, Shahid Lateef, figures in many places. One gets just a fleeting glimpse in the chapter, In the Name of Those Married Women . . . It is a matter of speculation as to why a brutally honest and outspoken author like Ismat Chughtai shied away from talking about her married life. Was this reluctance to talk an admission of the failure of her married life? Or did she set herself a limit on how much she would reveal, since some facts are too personal to be chronicled even in an autobiography? Was she exercising her individual freedom to be selective, much as the iconic black feminist writer and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston had done in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road ? 5 These questions will tantalize readers as they go through the pages of this volume.

The condition-of-women novel began to be written in Urdu, albeit in a reformist mode, as early as the 1870s, much before its emergence in other Indian languages, with the fictional works of deputy Nazir Ahmad 6 (1830-1912), and continued through the works of Ahmad s nephew, Rashidul Khairi (1868-1936). But it would be many years before full-fledged biographical or autobiographical accounts by women in Urdu