Object as subject: Material agency in Ismat Chughtai’s “The Quilt” and “Chhoti Apa”

ABSTRACT

Ismat Chughtai was an Urdu-language writer in India whose affiliation with the Progressive Writers Movement sparked a lifelong tryst with socialism. This article examines the “material agency” found in household objects that help to co-create a society for women within their private gendered domains in which they hold power. The quilt and the diary – objects in Chughtai’s short stories “The Quilt” and “Chhoti Apa” respectively – serve as biographical insight into the women’s lives because they create a subjectivity that was previously denied to Muslim women by oriental ethnographic studies. The agency of the objects lies in their ability to morph their meaning according to contexts, revealing the socially constructed nature of identity of humans and objects, forged by wrestling with variables such as gender and sexuality. Chughtai’s stories “unveil” Muslim women’s daily performative acts of resistance in a decolonial discourse on material culture and postcolonial feminism.

KEYWORDS:

• Ismat Chughtai
• material culture
• Progressive Writers Association
• postcolonial feminism
• gender domains
• Muslim women’s agency

Introduction: Chughtai’s unveiling of strategies of domination

Translator M. Asaduddin notes in his introduction to Ismat Chughtai’s (2012) memoir A Life in Words that “Ismat preferred to characterise her writing as photography rather than painting; some of her plots are taken directly from real life with minimal changes, and biographical and historical contexts are extremely important for uncovering the significance of her works” (xv).

Chughtai wrote with a realism characteristic of the members of the Progressive Writers Association that was underway during the middle decades of 20th-century India (when the Freedom Movement was at its peak in inaugurating the process of decolonization). She wrote what became considered as the “condition of women” texts (Chughtai 2012, xii) that emerged in Urdu literary circles. Writer and translator Rakhshanda Jalil (2014) adds that “in a society which still practiced rigorous seclusion of the sexes, Ismat’s writings opened a window into the life of the ‘other’ and allowed her male readers a glimpse into the zenana with all its intrigues, excitements and sorrows” (326). What characterized her gaze into the inner workings of women’s spaces was the conscious calculation about how much of the figurative window to prop open, as seen in her short stories such as “The Quilt”, “Chhoti Apa”, “The Veil”, and “A Morsel”, to name a few. In “The Veil”, for instance, a newly-wed bride refuses to lift her veil when her husband “orders” her to do so (Chughtai 2004, 2–4). The bride utilizes traditional mores that dictate modesty to stand her ground against the husband’s “requests” for her to deviate from her ascribed role of a dutiful wife. Her veil (ghunghat) transforms from an object of seclusion to a tool of resistance, as she exercises her conjugal right to observe purdah.

This dichotomy between tradition and modernity punctuated the separate spheres that women and men occupied respectively. Chughtai refused to essentialize the woman’s cause as she did not “paint” her characters in a vision of Utopia but rather chose to depict a fissured reality by “photographing” women who were domestic and agential. In “The Veil” (Chughtai 2004), the bride’s non-compliance with her husband’s orders to unveil her face is an example of behavioural resistance that challenges “strategies of domination” (Haynes and Prakash 1991, 3) through the cultural garment adorned by the woman, and in “The Quilt” it is the quilt that women utilize to voice their homoerotic desires. Unlike Chughtai herself who fought vocally and publicly to gain freedom from her family and society by denouncing purdah and seeking higher education, the protagonists in her stories resist in alternative ways. I locate these women’s resistant practices in the objects that they employ to manifest their agency drawing on the contributions made in the fields of material culture, gender, and social anthropology. The interstitial nature of agency combats the daily micro-aggressions women are subjected to. Women challenge their submissive positions in oppressive structures of domination through the subversive use of everyday objects.

In conducting an object-oriented study of Chughtai’s “The Quilt” and “Chhoti Apa”, this article juxtaposes theories proposed by material culture scholars about the need to move beyond the antinomy of “objects possessing or distributing agency” and “containing social agency derivative from human attachments”. This article situates material agency as a floating concept residing between humans and their objects, finding an intermediary space outside this subject/object dichotomy. Drawing on Janet Hopkins’s theory of “biographical objects” and Christopher Tilley’s postulation of reading objects as metaphors of the self, the women occupying the private domain can be read as enacting their agential capacity through Actor-Network theory. Chughtai’s fiction resounds with an affirmation of this relationship between women and their things; domestic, sometimes religious, “trivial” objects that are wielded by women for their own gains to fight back, to safeguard their personal space, and most importantly to survive in making using of the space that they have been allotted to resist obsequiousness. The quilt and the diary as objects in Chughtai’s stories go beyond their object-status when they enact the agency of the women whose stories they hide and reveal simultaneously. In doing so, they unveil the farcical narrative of women’s own object-statuses. When inanimate objects can gain the power to direct the course of action for women, Chughtai questions why women are presumed to be objects without similar powers of agency.

Gendered domain as a site for female society

The delineation of gendered spheres – into the public and private – has materialized into – and also developed from – the physical demarcation of the space of the house. In India, this ideology has continued in different ways in colonial and postcolonial decades. The task of women’s social reform during the independence movement was not motivated by a preference for western liberalism, but a new strain of nationalism and anti-colonial sentiment. The “resolution” proposed by the Indian upper-class bhadralok intelligentsia was not a dissolution of the public and private spheres, as liberalism argued, but a recasting of the spheres to represent two cultures – “material and spiritual” (Chatterjee 1990, 237). This ideology percolated into the separation of everyday social space into “ghar and bahir, the home and the world” (238). The connection of ghar, literally meaning house, to a spiritual abode, and bahir, meaning outside, to the world, transmuted into the material terrain becoming the domain of the male, while women became keepers of the home’s “essence” (239).

This “separate spheres ideology” (Helly and Reverby 1992) should be recognized for its status as a constructed concept that emerged from an oriental standpoint (fulfilling a harem fantasy) and was carried forward in a new garb by Indian nationalists (home as the abode of spirituality); “if separate spheres existed, they were socially constructed and susceptible to change” (5; my emphasis) according to changing gender codes and roles in society. These “gendered domains” (23) that the men and women are relegated to are mutually created and reliant on the constructed-ness and fluidity of each term – gender and domain. A gendered domain comes to be perceived as such due to the performance of gendered identity within a space and vice versa as the space informing one’s gender.

Within the spatial-cultural context of 20th-century India in which Chughtai grew up and in which her protagonists are situated, the women who stay at home, manage household affairs, maintain purdah, wear a veil when they go out, and are generally associated with the home, come to “become” women by virtue of their place in the domestic sphere, in that these activities and spaces define their gender. It comes to be expected of their gender and becomes a definitive characteristic of that gender’s role in society. Thus, their space informs their gender as one leading the private, familial domain of the house. Inversely, the women transform the space into a “feminine” one by virtue of their inhabiting it; the space simultaneously is gender inflected due to the habitation of women, becoming their assigned space, just as their gender roles are socially assigned.

This relationship between women and space informs Chughtai’s views on “domestic women” as she captures their negotiation with space. As Asaduddin also observes in the introduction to the memoir, Chughtai occupied a “conjugal terrain” that “allowed her to make significant interventions in the way the women’s question was sought to be articulated” (Chughtai 2012, xxi) as her experiential analysis combated the Victorian notion of the “angel in the house”. Refuting this notion of women’s space as a site of inaction, in the context of the Egyptian harem societies that existed in the 18th and 19th centuries, feminist theorists Reina Lewis and Sarah Mills (2003) argue that these secluded spaces function as a “site of female society, structured by its own internal hierarchies” (15). In these internal societies of the zenana, women lead their lives in accordance with the expectations of tradition, while managing to carve out a space in which to fulfil their own desires. Society functions as a keeper of women’s secrets and enabler of their material agency.

Chughtai’s most cited short story “The Quilt” (Lihaaf) explores the relationship between two women within this space allotted to them. The young narrator is sent to her mother’s friend’s house to stay with her for a while when she notices that Begum Jan, the wife of a Nawab (royalty), is wilting with “loneliness” as the Nawab pays all his attention to “young, fair and slim-waisted boys” (Chughtai 2004, 8) – the first mention of homosexuality, although this does not take precedence in the story. Begum Jan “climbed the elaborate four-poster bed and started counting her days” (8) as her husband did not reciprocate any desire to consummate their marriage. It is from the “chinks in the drawing-room doors” (8) – that is, any opening that she can find from her marital seclusion – that she notices her husband is preoccupied with “gossamer shirts”, since he does not “allow her to venture outside the home” (9). She observes the goings-on in the communal spaces of her house but cannot traverse the boundary of her room set by the Nawab. Just as Begum Jan begins to “go under”, she is rescued by Rabbo, a masseuse, under whose treatments her “emaciated body began to fill out” (9). Behind “closed doors [&] she is always massaging Begum Jan’s head, feet, or some other part of her anatomy” (10) as she is the “only one allowed inside the sanctum” (11). It is, however, at night-time, when the adolescent narrator is made to sleep in Begum Jan’s room, that she notices that “Begum Jan’s quilt was shaking vigorously, as if an elephant was struggling beneath it” (13). The narrator’s childish unfamiliarity with sexual acts sparks her curiosity enough to interrogate the matter when she learns that Rabbo is with the Begum. The “elephant” makes appearances every night after that when, finally, the restless narrator “flipped the switch on the bedside lamp” (18). Chughtai ends the narrative on an ambiguous note that nevertheless carries enough subtext to confirm the homosexual relationship between Rabbo and Begum Jan. The narrator ends by exclaiming: “What I saw when the quilt was lifted, I will never tell anyone, not even if they give me a lakh of rupees” (19).

This hesitance to articulate the sexual act is a pragmatic decision made by Chughtai in acknowledging that the narrator would not know how to articulate what she saw due to her naivety. It also highlights Chughtai’s insistence on keeping the secret hidden and not lifting the figurative quilt to expose the women to the readership, to respect the barrier that the quilt creates for the women who are able to use it to “come alive” again. When translator Asaduddin notes that “Ismat Chughtai was writing silences, recording the suppressed voice of women from different strata of society” (Chughtai 2012, xviii; original emphasis), we see her also maintaining these silences to emphasize that breaking them would jeopardize the safety of women like Begum Jan who, instead of peeking through the door cracks, started looking inwards into the space that was mapped out for her to derive pleasure from.

The parallel nature of adultery committed by the Nawab and the Begum, with one taking place brazenly in the open public forum, signifying the commanding power that the husband holds, and the other taking place in secret, under the folds of the quilt that serves as the barrier between the two worlds, punctuates the demarcation of physical space. The partial access that is granted to the narrator of the story on account of her being a girl (who is allowed into the Begum’s private sphere) as well as being young enough to also drop into the more “public” spaces (in which the Nawab presides over his students) adds to the authenticity with which the sexual liaisons are depicted; it foregrounds the gender hierarchy that children (irrespective of gender) learn to circumvent by revealing that seclusion is enforced upon reaching puberty, after “becoming a woman” (de Beauvoir [1949] 2015). This hierarchy that prevails, with the man drawing the boundaries for the women of the household, is circumvented by the child narrator, indicating the possibility of transcending the supposedly rigid boundary. It shows that the notion of “separate spheres” is in fact a socially constructed ideology that benefits from the gender construct; a “woman’s place” is conceived when she “becomes” a woman and counteractively a child/girl will “become” a woman when she graduates into the “women’s space” (on reaching puberty and/or getting married).

When the story begins, we find Begum Jan relegated to her bed by her husband who forbids her from going outside, in contrast to the Nawab’s own forays into activities with other men out in the open. While this image seemingly conforms to the popular reading of the zenana that sees the woman as an object because she ceases to function on her own and only exists to serve the man (Begum Jan “counting her days” waiting for the Nawab), Chughtai shifts this paradigm to reveal how the women find ways to accommodate themselves within their circumstances when she alludes to the relationship between Rabbo and the Begum. Foregoing any overt pronouncement of the relationship between the two women symbolized by the quilt, Chughtai, in writing this silence, is “restoring agency” to the women through a “negotiation with structures, often subterranean and subversive, rather than visible and frontal” (2012, xix); what is consecrated under the quilt is below the surface, and therefore free from the impositions of gender norms. Begum Jan’s presumed heterosexuality linked to her gender by patriarchal society is unlinked by Chughtai to posit an alternate view that breaks the heteronormative gender construct. The quilt here is an object enforcing a contrasting concept of seclusion or purdah whereby Begum Jan’s decision to be with Rabbo is materialized. Their muffled voices are heard from under the quilt in the pages of Chughtai’s story not despite being hidden but because of being hidden. The women use the quilt in the story to assert their agency in keeping the men out of their space and use the power that they exercise inside the bedroom to do so. The women in the story occupy a “gendered habitus” in which the subjects engage in a dynamic process with the social field that they occupy (Gopal 2005, 75). The space constructed within the four walls of the bedroom is dominated by the women within, who manipulate its restrictive nature by bending it to fulfil their desires, utilizing the quilt to do so.

Chughtai is cognizant of the fact that being relegated to a private space, often misrepresented as static, does not take away the women’s agency within that space. In circumventing the limitations of this space, she illuminates the authority of the women who forge the space into one that complies with their needs. All three who have access to the internal space of Begum Jan’s bedroom establish their own system of functioning; the narrator keeps the women’s relationship a secret from outsiders in order to maintain the balance of power within its walls. The gendered domain functions as a “female society” governed by them and for them.

Chughtai “restores” agency to women like Begum Jan who have been designated in the discourse surrounding women’s agency as “non-modern” and invisible due to their Muslim identity, by Hindu upper-class nationalists and liberal feminist politics, as their agency is “veiled” (Sarkar 2008, 2). There is a need to identify alternative modes of agency within the constraints imposed which are “often subversive rather than frontal or visible, and as likely to involve capitulation – and not simply as a linear, unidirectional story of overcoming and eventual emergence into modern, liberal, and/or ‘feminist’ subjecthood” (21). Saba Mahmood (2011) locates agency “not only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one inhabits norms” (10; original emphasis). Begum Jan’s resistance to the structure of oppression that keeps her inside the zenana becomes apparent when the focus is shifted inward into the interior space of the home; there, she is in charge of her actions and fulfils her desires by turning the space into one governed by the three inhabitants. As Geeta Patel (2001) notes in her reading of “The Quilt”, “Begum Jan’s will to live in the zenana under the conditions of the modern becomes an allegory for women whose lives are folded into layers of illusionary ideals about the place of women” (187). The homosexual act in the zenana denounces the space as “completely subservient to a phallic symbolic order” (178) with the use of domestic objects within the space. The quilt hides Begum’s resistance to norms by providing cover, and simultaneously serves as the tool used to resist.

Objects as autobiographical extensions and the networks of agential embodiment

Postcolonial spaces are determined by “power/knowledge relations” (Massey 2005, 64) that function through the interplay between colonial power and colonized spaces. The zenana’s semantic representation in colonial accounts as a space of sexual fantasy and women’s subservience is countered in Chughtai’s social realist stories where the zenana functions as a reactive space in which to challenge hegemonic colonial and neo-colonial powers through the actions of its inhabitants. The private space of the house is a social space, just like the “material sphere” of bahir/world, and is thus a constructed space. This space is produced by “things” – human beings, objects, products (Lefebvre 1991, 82–83). “Things” within the ghar/house dictate how the space is framed through their phenomenological presence, which includes domestic objects.

In the nexus between gender-construction and materiality, space comes to be understood through its defining and redefining by women’s gendered presence. Judy Mathews demonstrates how “people define space” (quoted in Ardener 1993, 3; original emphasis), to which Goffman (1979) adds that objects define space too:

Objects are thought to structure the environment immediately around themselves; they cast a shadow, heat up the surround, strew indications, leave an imprint, they impress a part of themselves, a portrait that is unintended and not dependant on being attended, yet of course, informing nonetheless to whomsoever is properly placed, trained and inclined. (1)

Goffman’s claim that objects have the power to shape the space they inhabit confirms the intermingled nature of agency that is performed in a space by people and objects. This “material agency” brought about a turn in material studies discourse of viewing “agency” (defined as active participation or intervention) as “no longer the sole preserve of humans” (Hicks and Beaudry 2010, 7). New arguments on the “extension of ‘agency’ from humans to material things” (5), however, have introduced several conflicting viewpoints, with theorists Andy Jones, Bruno Latour, and Nicky Boivin finding objects to be “fully agentive” while others like Alfred Gell and Andrew Pickering view objects as “indexes of human agency” (Hicks and Beaudry 2010, 9).

Chughtai forges an intermediary path between these two approaches, one that locates the agency of the protagonists in her stories as amorphously present in the exchange between women and objects. An object that resides in a socially feminized architectural domain of the house comes to reflect the agency channelled by women in that domain. The woman is “fully agentive” as a gendered subject while her material “things” derive and reflect the agency channelled through her and through the gendered space that is consecrated. The objects, in serving as models of expression, are able to define the space (conceptualized by Erving Goffman) and serve as more than “indexes” of a “distributed personhood” (Hicks and Beaudry 2010, 8).

In “The Quilt”, the quilt functions as an object used to execute the desire of Begum Jan and Rabbo to be together, and comes to function as a mediating field between the private and public spheres. The quilt as a thing made of cloth symbolizes the secretive, liminal nature of their relationship to the extent that the narrator associates the inanimate object with elephant-like energy that the two women exhibit (Chughtai 2004, 13). As the story is a retroactive narration of past events by a now-grown-up narrator, she begins the tale by remembering Begum Jan through the quilt: “Begum Jan whose quilt is imprinted on my memory like a blacksmith’s brand” (7); the quilt metonymically serves as the corporeal manifestation of Begum Jan. Through the “spatial metaphor” (Goffman 1979, 1) of the elephant which represents the sexual relationship between Begum Jan and Rabbo, the expansiveness of the quilt’s movement is conveyed. The object’s material agency is derived from the “extension of agency from humans to material things” (Hicks and Beaudry 2010, 5) not in a rectilinear manner from a host to receiver, but through an oscillating exchange of gendered identities, residing in the women, their spaces, and the objects within those feminized spaces.

The quilt serves as an extension and conduit through which Begum Jan and Rabbo manifest their desires and uphold the secrets of the zenana. Crossland (2010) analyses the materials that adorn women’s bodies as part of an “archaeology of embodiment” (2) by which the clothes that are worn serve as “artefacts” that are “extensions of the body” (10). By expanding the locus of this embodiment to include domestic objects that women come into contact with, this “archaeology”, which connotes a “dependent biography” (Hicks and Beaudry 2010, 10) of the women, creates the interwoven agency between them and their possessions. Material agency transcends the subject/object binary to forge a third possibility that blurs the subject–object status by locating subjectivity within objects. This entails not only the agency with which Chughtai equips her protagonists, who acquire subjectivity through their gendered identity (that is stereotypically seen as non-agential by ethnographers), but also the agency that she gives the domestic objects such as women’s clothes and the quilt on the bed, among others. Through the “actions” of the objects, as directed by the women, we get a more nuanced understanding of this agency. It is located within the private, subterranean struggles that are concealed in women’s silences but nevertheless are manifested through objects acting as extensions of their subjectivity.

The agential value attached to these “biographical objects” (Hopkins 1998, 5) lies in the interstices of the process of writing women’s actions and the manifestation of their resistance. Another short story by Chughtai, “Chhoti Apa”, illustrates this relationship dynamic, as the younger sibling (the narrator) of Chhoti Apa (Elder Sister) discovers “a few musty sheets thrust inside a crevice” (2004, 65) that reveal (to herself and the readers) the secret romances that Chhoti Apa partook of in her youth. The narrator was intent on finding “secret letters, old scraps of paper, notebooks, precious possessions that people stash away in the folds of old clothing” (65; emphasis added) that would evidently bust the “myth” (65) that Apa had created in the minds of her family members. We know that this myth of being a chaste, obedient woman who has no life outside the role mapped out by the family is perpetuated beyond her social strata by anthropologists outside the zenana who fail to notice the woman’s alternative methods of resistance. In this scenario, it is confirmed by the narrator’s reaction to discovering “Chhoti Apa’s diary” (65). In an apt metaphor that reveals the inner turmoil that Apa has faced, despite appearing vacuous to her, the narrator reveals that “like the motionless illusion of a madly spinning top, she was staring vacantly into space” (71). This illusion, this myth that Chughtai seeks to dismantle is achieved through Apa’s diary which functions as a vessel carrying the “reality” of her life. Adding to Hopkins’s list of examples which include “the betel pouch, the hollow drum, the funeral shroud” (5) which can all serve as “containers” (5), the diary can be added as it similarly “contains” the autobiography of Chhoti Apa’s life, as opposed to a biography deductively written by others.

Material agency blurs the lines between human and object here as the diary is neither “fully agentive” nor just an “index of human agency”, but an embodiment of identity (Hicks and Beaudry 2010, 9). Hopkins (1998) calls these objects “memory boxes” as they not only “hold things inside” (5) but also “mediate for the person” (3). In divulging the “contours” (Chughtai 2004, 71) of Chhoti Apa’s life to us, the object-status accorded to Apa by her sister changes as her personal life materializes in the diary to become what Zoë Crossland has termed a “dependant biography” (quoted in Hicks and Beaudry 2010, 10). While personal information is articulated by Apa in the diary, it is communicated through a mediating object that carries the agency governing Apa’s choices and is shared as “crumpled scraps of paper adding up to a beautiful life” (Chughtai 2004, 71). Like the quilt that Begum Jan used to withhold her secret, the diary is a container of secrets that is inaccessible to others. James Olney defines autobiographies as “metaphors of the self” (quoted in Hopkins 1998, 5) which exist in the form of the quilt and the diary, thereby making these objects which are “extensions of the self”, also “metaphors of the self”. The objects thus become representative of the person and the voice of the person. They carry the veiled voices of the women that percolate through Chughtai’s writing to speak to readers who have been led to believe they do not possess the means to speak.

In defining material agency as residing in the relationship shared between women and their objects, Chughtai foregrounds that previous efforts to locate a singular notion of agency as resistance fail to notice material agency as an “everydayness of resistance in social life” (Haynes and Prakash 1991, 2). Within the domestic, restricted sphere of the house, women act through objects in order to resist. Due to the static nature of objects, they are perceived as “harmless”, which is a misconception that women utilize for their particular gains. Women are able to resist through objects not because objects are vacant containers, but through a partnership between the two. Women recognize in objects their own projected object-status and just as they wish to challenge their own status, they use objects in an effort to reveal their dynamism. The relationship between human beings and objects is analysed by Andrew Jones and Nicole Boivin (2010) in an article in which they see Gell’s argument for objects being “indexes” as problematic since it identifies them as “secondary agents” that “can act only as the media of human social agency, which could be distributed through them” (8). While this dismantles the Cartesian subject/object dichotomy by recognizing agency as more than a function of human sentience, it still locates “primary agency” within humans – the “true subjects”.

Michael Callon and John Law proposed Actor-Network theory in order to place significance not on humans or objects individually, but on the relationship between them. In suggesting that it is the “forms of the attachment between humans and things that require explanation” (Jones and Boivin 2010, 12), Actor-Network theory argues that “things [&] act as intermediaries for human action. It is the articulations between actors and their intermediaries that compose networks. Such articulations between people and things effectively ‘translate’ action and thereby co-ordinate it” (12). The network formed in female societies in Chughtai’s stories in which the women enact their agency through objects “translates” what Asaduddin terms the “silences” in “subterranean” ways through the autobiographies that they created in the quilt and the diary.

Chughtai sought to disavow the objectification of women in their private spaces that resulted from anthropology’s “spatial thinking” (Booth 2010, 7) of women as housebound and consequently without “free will”. Her stories do capture the regulations put on women, variously in the form of the limitation on women’s education, mobility, and adornment; however, she refrains from seeing these as indicators of lack of agency. Her characters – Begum Jan and Chhoti Apa – assert the power that they possess within the space that is allotted to them. It is channelled through the objects that inhabit the same space as the women. Chughtai dismantles the object-status accorded to women by according subjectivity to objects. Thus, a material agency is located in the networks formed, which work to reassign subjectivity to objects relevant to women and their spaces.

Conclusion: Dynamic objects and their gendered identities

The relational networks between objects that inform each other’s characteristics have been analysed in terms of their capacity to inflect the semantic ontology of objects. The objects in a space are gendered due to the social gendering of the space itself. In the public/private binary, it is gender that features as the primary variable that dictates how the objects will be perceived. For example, the bedroom and the kitchen are perceived as domestic, feminized spaces because women’s duties are allocated in them in “Classic Patriarchal”¹ (Kandiyoti 1988, 278) family structures. This characteristic of material semiology by which objects acquire their meaning through socially constructed variables is necessary in understanding material agency. Social anthropologist Sarah Pink (2004) investigates the impact of sensory experiences on the objects within the home. She sees human “engagements with and metaphoric references to the aural, tactile, olfactory, and visual elements of their homes” as subsequently manifesting “gendered identities” that are “performed” (10).

It is the metaphorical perceptions through the senses that Chughtai captures in her stories that emerge as markers of womanhood. Women’s sexuality is tied to the identification of their gender – “the elephant’s movements” and the “madly spinning top” refer to the performance of sexuality that destabilizes the existing, conferred, gendered identity of the women as “innocent”, removing the trappings of the heterosexual, monogamous married housewife. In “The Quilt”, the elephant’s movements – “convulsing”, “fluttering”, “billowing” (Chughtai 2004, 18–19) – wake the child narrator from her sleep due to its “noisiness” of movements, compounded by a visual description of the quilt “assuming such weird shapes” (19). Begum Jan’s sexuality is performed under the quilt in a different fashion to how she performs it outside the quilt (through a heterosexual relationship with her husband); nevertheless, the “elephant” that performs homosexuality is a part of the woman that Begum is. The narrator’s exclamation that the quilt appears to her first as an “innocent part of the bed” (13) which changes when she witnesses the “billowing” act, contributes to the sensory experience of “how gender is produced along with the material and sensory environments at home” (Pink 2004, 10). The truth about Begum’s sexual preferences alters her gendered identity that shifts from a perceived “innocent” woman to a “fluttering” sexually “deviant” woman in the narrator’s eyes (Chughtai 2004, 18–19). Likewise, when Chhoti Apa’s past is revealed, it brings her mythic identity to the fore as a woman with “a beautiful life” (71).

The sensory representations of the material objects that image women’s sexuality in the stories are “metonymic” and metaphorical. Material agency in these instances consolidates a tie between the “subjective”/gendered identity that women are prescribed and have to perform, and their “objective”/real sexuality that they have to proscribe and hide in society. Neetu Khanna (2020) argues that

[d]ecolonization for Chughtai, the liberation of a colonized consciousness, is always contingent on the radical reconstitution of the female body and her desires, precisely because gender provided the grounds of colonial subjection through corporeal refashioning. (107)

Chhoti Apa and Begum Jan’s material agency facilitates in forging a space that is outside the inside of societal structures. It challenges the western colonial ethnographic representation of the “Muslim woman of the East” without agency (Suleri 1992), and also the neo-colonial Indian representation of Muslim woman as the Other of the modern Hindu woman by decolonizing and severing the concept of agency from its progressive political trappings that view only resistance and not negotiation as agency.

The metaphors of the elephant and the spinning top establish a relation between materiality and human beings. Hopkin’s notion of “biographical objects” that finds objects and humans as complexly “intertwined” (1998, 5) is extended in Tilley’s study, which investigates how the agency that objects have is manifested. Tilley (2002) proposes that objects assert their “communicative agency” to humans through metaphors as “when we link things metaphorically, we recognise similarity in difference, we think one thing in terms of the attributes of another” (24). The animistic and anthropomorphic way in which Chughtai writes Rabbo and Begum Jan’s bodily experience is through the metaphor of an elephant whose ravenous appetite stands in for the sexual “feast” that the narrator of “The Quilt” notices. The gendered self as “culturally variable” finds expression in the objects that are “extensions of ourselves” (Hicks and Beaudry 2010, 10) through this process of finding similarity between the material and the human experience.

In “Chhoti Apa”, the diary reveals romantic and/or sexual aspects of Chhoti Apa’s identity that she herself does not reveal to us; the diary serves as the forger of Apa’s identity by expanding its scope, even if only as a container for her memories. This reinstates power in the objects and sees them as active contributors in the creation of gendered identities. Both the quilt and the diary possess secret knowledge that, when revealed, alter how the narrator/reader understands the characters of Begum Jan and Chhoti Apa respectively. Knowledge of the women’s sexual encounters, which alerts us to their sexuality, is extended to the objects and, through these objects, is also given meaning. The objects act out the sexual identity of the protagonists through metaphorical meaning-making, thereby doing more than containing the truth but also performing that truth. Their sexual identities in turn contribute to the construction of their gender as it fosters an environment in which the women take charge of the private space allotted to them and “write” their stories as women who are apas (sisters) and begums (wives).

Jones and Boivin delineate a scientific analysis of the relationship between material and human agency when they propose that humans and objects are made up of matter that gains meaning through its action-oriented character. “Matter does not have a fixed essence” (Jones and Boivin 2010, 13) whose meaning is thereby not static; on the contrary, matter derives meaning from the actions that it performs, as “matter is a substance in its intra-active becoming”. This configures agency as being performative, and finds this agency as residing in all matter (humans and objects). This matter’s meaning-making process, by which its identity is forged, is located not in its “thing-ness” but its “doing-ness” (13). Once it is established that human/object identity is socially constructed and subject to motivated forces of power, gender, sexuality, religion, and so on, identity becomes a fluid, dynamic entity that is alterable and constitutive of the spatiality that it inhabits. Appadurai (1986) explicates the life cycle of “things” in his Introduction to The Social Life of Things, arguing that “we have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories” (5). Their “trajectories” are the spaces that they pass through, that they reside in; these contexts inform their meaning. Their “uses” by women similarly inform their meaning; when used by Begum Jan (“The Quilt”) and Chhoti Apa (“Chhoti Apa”) in Chughtai’s short stories, the meaning of the object (quilt or diary) replaces or adds to its previous meaning, forging a self-wrought identity.

Chughtai draws parallels between Begum Jan, Rabbo, and Chhoti Apa, and the objects that are connected to their truths, namely of their homoerotic desires and their romantic/sexual past. She uses the metaphor of the “madly spinning top” to destabilize the ethnographic standpoint of women’s inactive status inside the private space of the house. She unveils the illusive quality of women’s agency by showing their reliance on objects to forge a network of subjects and objects, that ultimately form a female society within the zenana. The material agency witnessed in the stories decolonizes the notion of agency by tracing its execution in alternate spaces not under the surveillance of colonial or neo-colonial authorities. These women’s agential capacity in their everyday life is in contrast to overt resistance, and is presented to us through sensory and metaphorical ties between objects. These ties are captured by Chughtai as “photographs” to convey a realism in the activities performed. The network of humans and objects within the social spaces of the home operate through a material agency that foregrounds Muslim women’s subjectivities by presenting them as active participants in each others’ lives.

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Sheelalipi Sahana

Sheelalipi Sahana is a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her work focuses on the Indian Progressive Writers’ methods to decolonize gendered space. Her research is informed by postcolonial feminism and material culture, and aims to study the links between intersectionality and space.

Notes

1. Kandiyoti’s (1988) term is for societies such as those found in India which are a “patrilineal-patrilocal complex for women” (278).