Reading the Margins as Central: Representations of domestic servants in Nazir Ahmed and Ismat Chughtai’s literary works

ABSTRACT

This paper revisits the Urdu literary works of Deputy Nazir Ahmed and Ismat Chughtai to unravel the changing ways in which they depicted the servants and servant-like characters in their description of the north Indian middle-class urban Muslim household in the late 19th and first half of the twentieth century. It argues that fiction writers like Ahmed had a conception of the respectable household that envisaged a strict control over the conduct of the servants with a view to curb their ‘corrupting influence’ on the women and children of the family. Nazir Ahmed’s preoccupation with the reform of the Muslim sharif household in the light of their declining economic and political status shaped his attitude towards domestic servants and lower classes in general. In contrast, writing in the early and mid-twentieth century, Ismat Chughtai and other ‘daughters of reform’ began questioning the politics of the sharif household, much of which was accepted by the previous generation of writers, mostly reformists, as unproblematic. Chughtai used her writing as a site of criticism against a social and political system that she viewed as unjust and exploitative. In her works, domestic servants are essentially presented as an exploited class with a voice of its own. In her stories, domestic servants express their opinions, and by doing so, expose the narrowly conceived worldview of the sharif middle class. Taken together, the two authors separated by nearly three decades, represented contrasting views through the decades of the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The paper addresses a neglected field of social-literary history: the presence and place of domestic servants in the politics of constructing new norms for the household and for the nation.

KEYWORDS:

• Domestic servants
• Urdu literature
• Deputy Nazir Ahmed
• Ismat Chughtai
• colonial India

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The phrase ‘Age of Reform’ was coined by Mushirul Hasan; see Hasan, A Moral Reckoning, p. 157.

2. Oesterheld, “Nazir Ahmad,” 28.

3. Ibid., also see, Siddique, “Worlds of Advice.”

4. Naim, “Prize-winning Adab,” 304.

5. I borrow this term from Sinha, “‘Servant Problem’ and the ‘Social Subaltern.’” I use it in a slightly different way, to refer to the recurring references to reform domestic servants within these didactic tales in tandem with the reform the sharif household.

6. For one prominent exception see Banerjee, Men, Women and Domestics.

7. This is borrowed from the chapter title in Minault, Secluded Scholars.

8. Minault, Secluded scholars, 277.

9. Ibid., 278.

10. Asaduddun, Lifting the Veil; and Kumar, Ismat: Her Life, Her Times.

11. Gupta, “Servants and Mistresses.”

12. This is a reference to Chatterjee’s argument with regards to the discourse that emerged after the colonial encounter and how the Indian nationalist’s engaged with the colonizer’s criticism of “degenerate and barbaric” tradition. For more details see Chatterjee, “Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonialized Women.”

13. There has been a considerable debate as to whether consider Deputy Nazir Ahmed’s didactic tales of the Bride’s Mirror and other works as novels or not. I have chosen not to engage with this issue, as for the purposes of this paper, it suffices to see them as didactic texts aimed at reform. For more details on the debate see Frances Pritchett’s afterword to Ahmad, The Bride’s Mirror.

14. Cited in Lal, “Gender and sharafat,” 15.

15. Ibid., 17.

16. C. M. Naim in contrast has maintained that Nazir Ahmed’s work with regards to women, “must have appeared radical to the orthodox of his time.” Naim, “Prize-winning Adab,” 309.

17. For instance, see Hindi stories from this period, in Sinha and Kumar, Lesser Lives. Also, Gupta, “Domestic Anxieties.”

18. Tyagi, “Invisible Lives.”

19. I have used G. E. Ward’s translated version in this paper. Ahmad, The Bride’s Mirror, 18.

20. Ibid.,19.

21. Ahmed presents Zulfan and the tribe as close friends of Akbari who are also her servants, so they can be categorized as Servant – friends. The dichotomy is important as it highlights the tensions that Ahmed sees in such relationships.

22. Ibid., 41.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. The Translation is mine. I have used the following edition, Ahmad, Banat un-Nash, 9.

26. Ibid., 10.

27. Ahmad, The Bride’s Mirror, 56.

28. I borrow this compound term from Ruby Lal, which I think is an apt description of Asghari, as presented by Nazir Ahmed. For more details on this term, see Lal, Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India.

29. Ahmad, The Bride’s Mirror, 63–64.

30. Ibid., 65.

31. Ibid., 67.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid., 68.

34. Ibid., 101.

35. Ibid.

36. The translation is mine. Chughtai, Kaghzi Hai Pairahan, 19–20.

37. Ibid., 20.

38. Ibid.

39. I have used the following edition in this paper; translation is mine. Chughtai, “Hindustan Chor Do,” 17–34.

40. Ibid., 20.

41. Ibid., 22.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid., 29.

45. Ibid., 23.

46. Ibid., 24.

47. Ibid., 26.

48. Ibid., 33.

49. Ibid., 46–47.

50. The Translation is mine. I have used the following edition of the short story collection, Chughtai, “Khidmatgar,” 47.

51. Ibid., 49.

52. Ibid., 50.

53. Ibid., 51.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid., 52.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid.

58. This is a reference to Ranajit Guha’s argument that nationalist bourgeoisie in India was not hegemonic enough and couldn’t speak for the whole of society. For more details on his thesis see Guha, Dominance without hegemony.

59. Ibid., 68.