A Profile of Ismat Chugtai
by Farzana Versey
Where are they - these women of substance, who are quietly chipping away at the huge barricades waiting for the walls to come tumbling down? The ones who come out occasionally to fight against the Personal Law do not interest me.
I like the fire-and-brimstone kind. Call me elitist, but it is they who can show the world that the only fruitful activity is not merely looking to get out of a cage but how to preen your feathers, do a little pirouette, fly, free-fall.
You don’t find many of them around. There are a few who might fool you with their seductive adaabs in high society salons, champagne kissing their lips. But do they really know who they are, what they want to be?
I have to do a little rewind and only one name leaps out at me. Of a woman so spunky that she had her way even in death, when she wanted her body to be released into the sea so that the fish could savour it.
Ismat Chugtai was the kind of woman who despite the risk to limb and reputation you could trust your life with. Because she was a thinker, a person with feelings that ran deep and yet she had laughter coursing through her veins, as I discovered years ago.
“I don’t know what the hell my parents wanted from me. All I know is that I enjoyed more being with my four brothers than with any of my sisters. I also wanted to read English like them. My mother was so worried, she didn’t know whether I was a girl or a boy or something in-between!” And Ismat Chugtai laughed as she related this.
For someone who is remembered as a literary figure, her writing had begun on scraps, with curses jotted down against her brothers! And her inspiration came from romantic books. “But my knowledge of sex came from the servants and the way they described it, I found it all horrible. But my books were something different. The girl was always very beautiful. I always thought she was me. And she was always sick. The hero was a handsome doctor. This character emerged from the fact that our family doctor was fat and ugly. These stories I preserved in a box. And finally, when I was I3, my first story was published in an Urdu women’s magazine. The heroine I again imagined to be me and, because it was a romantic story with the couple kissing, I requested that my name should be left out.”
But her ambition grew and she wanted to write for men’s magazines. And did. This time her name was mentioned, but luckily for her the family had forgotten it! “I was called Chhuni at home. They did not realise it was I till the money order came and I was discovered. Then I got an award of Rs. 10 from which I bought a chiffon saree for six rupees.”
Soon chiffons were to be replaced with controversies. “In `Lihaaf’ I wrote about an eight-year-old’s view of lesbianism. They were discussions I had heard, though I did not know what the words meant. I knew what two men could do but not two women. A case was filed against this story in Lahore. Apparently, the people had understood it, though I hadn’t!” She rejoiced at having shaken the citadels of false morality. And she even won the case.
Without being tagged with the label she was a feminist. “I did not know if I was doing anything for women,” she admitted, “I was expressing my own anger, clearing my own mind. And I often discussed it with writer friends like Munto, Bedi, Kishenchand and Ashok, all men. Of course, their writings were different. Their heroines committed suicide. My heroes did!” And then she wrote about older women, younger men. “Why not?” she had exclaimed then. “Why should men always be the bully? To deceive man is important. I know women think like that,” she was convinced.
For a woman who was a pioneering feminist, she wondered at the portrayal of the self-sacrificing woman of today. “The greatest revolution they show today is that a woman marries according to her wishes. But I don’t think marriage keeps you from things. I married traditionally. (She was married to film director Shaheed Latif). It is the brain that’s important. But now most of the stories are about the sacrificing woman. I don’t know how the hell they suffer like that. Why don’t they make others suffer presuming that to suffer is in vogue.”
Even today reminiscing about her I find her words breathe fire and her cigarette spews smoke. “These people pity prostitutes, I envy them.”
Years ago, she along with women from the Congress House, had gone to a brothel to ask a woman there to give up the ‘dhanda’. "I was so fascinated when the woman fearlessly started abusing us. I quietly went again to meet her and realised that her boozard husband was the cause of her state.
Prostitution, I feel, is a man’s profession, not a woman’s."
Though her writings gave rise to storms, she was given awards - the Ghalib award, the Nehru award, and various state awards.
But is this the yardstick for success? Can this ensure timelessness? “Perhaps… but wait, I don’t think it can work when a minister is a patron. Things tend to get misused then.”
Ismat is one person who may have stopped kicking up a storm, but the ripples are still evident. How did she feel being recognised - elation or resignation, the feeling that I-have-seen-it-all-and-couldn’t-care-less? “I don’t feel anything. Or maybe I feel all right. At least I am not a freak any more!”
Her days had not been spent in penury, like a fading prima donna’s. In a well-appointed apartment, she showed me the rooms, including her grandson’s where a sticker screamed “I love girls”. Grandma was indulgent to such things. “His friends come and watch dirty films sometimes and they ask me to join them. I tell them that I don’t want to get spoilt now. I think it’s important to have an open attitude. I did not obey anyone and I don’t expect anyone to.”
And she missed nothing from the past because she knows she could recreate it. “I cleared my confusions long ago.” Though she sometimes did get confused, but about something different. About society. And she watched films on video. “Some of them are so irritating, but I have to watch to know what’s happening.”
And to know that not all things change for the better. Which is why she is still like a beacon of light because she understood darkness.