Her Words,Her Worlds

Publisher: Penguin

Pages: 281

Price: Rs 499

If you feel you have space in your life for another friend,then this is the book for you. A youthful Ismat Chughtai jumps exuberantly from every page,outrageously outspoken,courageous,honest and very,very funny. It doesnt matter if you have never read a word of her Urdu fiction,the strength and warmth of her personality and the stories of her escapades and adventures are enough to win your heart.

Strangely,her translator M. Asaduddin,in a highly informative and scholarly introduction,feels he has to defend Ismats autobiography and his decision to translate it. He argues that this book brings a deeper understanding of her work. He almost apologises for the fact that the chapters are episodic and only deal with her younger years.

However,he neednt worry. The freedom with which she moves from subject to subject means there is never a dull moment,and nothing is predictable. And,of course,throughout the book there is a complete absence of humbug.

Ismat refers only briefly to her development as an author,but still manages to sum up the essence of her style. I dont know why I had begun writing, she says. Admitting a great passion for reading,she continues,I began to experience the same thrill in writing as I did in reading. I was counted among the chatterboxes in our talkative family. When I wrote,I imagined my readers sitting before me. I talked and they listened. Some agreed with me. Some didnt… I narrate stories to my audience like a traditional storyteller. And just as a storyteller inserts personal opinions… so do I.

Her opinions were always strong. She opposed injustice head-on and became one of the leading progressive writers.

The members of her talkative and very boisterous family are among the chief characters in this book. She was the ninth of 10 brothers and sisters,the daughter of a deputy collector of proud Mughal lineage and his charmingly profligate wife. Ismat makes several references to Mughals being congenitally off their heads.

Girls today often dont stop at one degree or even two,and so its easy to forget what a struggle it was in Ismats day for a Muslim girl to even go to school. Educating girls was seen to be the same as prostituting them. Even Ismats father was forced by peer pressure to withdraw his elder daughters from school. Only Ismat,by dint of her determination and stubbornness,and the soft corner her father had for her,managed to make it to a BA an almost unheard of achievement.

Ismat makes clear how tough it was for the men and women who ran the girls school and college she attended. At one stage,a mullah in Aligarh,who ran a local paper,called her college a brothel and campaigned for it to be closed down. In response,the fiery Ismat wrote an article,saying that the college would be closed over the students dead bodies,and calling on their 6,000 rakhi brothers in Aligarh Muslim University to protect them. The principal of the college read the article,and posted it to the Aligarh Gazette. When it was published,the Aligarh boys thrashed the mullah and ransacked his office. Not perhaps the best means,but the girls were triumphant and no one tried to shut down the college again.

Later in life,Ismat became principal of a small girls school of a nawab in a small state where one of her brothers worked. The nawab,in her brothers absence,tried to force her and her 10-year-old niece to marry his sons. In a midnight escape,Ismat made her way to Bareilly where she became principal of a more regular girls school and faced opprobrium for allowing the girls to play boys games and for meeting male friends.

Ismat was as much at home in the company of men as of women. She knew how to flirt and how to puncture male egos. She writes about troubled marriages and infidelity,even describing the scene in which her father admitted to her mother that he had married a second time. However,for all her frankness,something of a veil is thrown over her own marriage.

Obscenity and the banning of books were also issues for Ismat as they are for us today. She was hauled up for obscenity over her story Lyhaaf about a lesbian relationship. However,she and Saadat Hasan Manto,who also faced obscenity charges for one of his stories,made light of the whole thing and treated their trips to Lahore for hearings as picnics. The prosecution case against her collapsed but the publicity the case brought resulted in Lyhaaf remaining by far the most well known of all her stories.

Only a very bad translation could muffle Ismats bell-clear voice,and Asaduddins translation is very good indeed. There are the odd occasions when one could differ with him but not for a moment do they mar this kaleidoscopic portrait of a glorious woman and of society in a time not too far removed from our own.