Femenism in Chughtai’s Works

Abstract

Ismat Chughtai was born in 1915 in Uttar Pradesh at a place called Badaun, associated with the memory of Gautama Buddha. She is Urdu’s most courageous and controversial woman writer in the twentieth century. Ismat Chughtai explores female sexuality while also exploring other dimensions of social and existential reality. She explores human relationships, their joys and sorrows, their loves and hates against the background of the larger social world and its changing environment. She portrayed the true psyche of the middle class Muslim girls with such fearlessness and openness that it gave the real shock of their life to the custodians of the society and religion. Her brisk and spontaneous dialogues make these stories forceful narratives from A Chughtai Collection and from Lifting the Veil. It depicts how women entangled forever in the notions of sexual and religious purity not only suffer but make the lives of their men also miserable as in The Veil.