‘No one heard me!’: sexual self-fashioning and the child in ‘Lihāf’

ABSTRACT

‘Lihāf’ by Ismat Chughtai is widely read as a tale of feminist and queer rebellion but it also narrates a complex account of a young girl’s initiation into sexuality as a result of her molestation by a much older woman. In this narratological study that also draws upon the historical context of the Urdu world of letters which framed Chughtai’s own self-fashioning as a writer and intellectual, I argue that the case for a feminist and queer-positive reading of ‘Lihāf’ often misses or downplays the sexual molestation of the narrator as a child and remains inattentive to the ways in which Chughtai constructs conflict and tension between the two voices that narrate the story: that of the adult narrator, a Muslim woman, who opens the tale and then, deploying the voice and perspective of a child, recalls and reconstructs the memory of the fateful events of her childhood. Central to my reading is the point of view of the child whose movement in and through the female-dominated zenānā re-presents the case for viewing ‘a women’s utopia’ in dystopic ways. By splitting the female perspective into two overlapping realms – those of the adult and the child – Chughtai rewrites desire as experienced by the ‘New Woman,’ a historical figure of feminist emancipation often identified in established literary and critical readings with Begum Jān. Such an identification, I argue, is, in fact, unidimensional and is trenchantly undermined in the story by the brutal and intersecting logic of patriarchal domination and class exploitation, a logic at whose fulcrum is the figure of the child as the dark Other of the New Woman.

KEYWORDS:

• History
• India
• narratology
• women’s writings
• queer
• literature

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to my assiduous research assistants Tathagata Som and Apala Kundu; to Suddhaseel Sen, whose help with the story in the Urdu original was invaluable for writing the essay; and to the anonymous reviewers at SAHC for their helpful comments. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Annual International Conference of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, in 2017. I thank Geetha Ganapathy-Doré, Nishat Zaidi, and Supriya Chaudhuri for their insights into early versions of this essay.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. For this essay, I consulted four English translations of ‘Lihāf’ and each in-text quotation has an endnote that provides the name of the translator and relevant page number. The use of multiple translations alerts us to the ways in which translational choices steer interpretation and make possible certain kinds of readings while closing others.

2. See “Autobiographical Fragments,” (trans. from Urdu by M. Asaduddin) excerpted from Chughtai’s autobiography Kāghazi hai Pairāhan (2004) where she dramatizes how the news of the obscenity trial reached her and how she and Manto handled the courtroom visits with humour and aplomb.

3. Khanna, “Gender, Self-representation and Sexualized Spaces,” 52–3.

4. See Lambert-Hurley, “To Write of the Conjugal Act,” 158–161 for a concise discussion of ‘female sexual expression’ in Muslim women’s autobiographical writings at the beginning of the twentieth century – a socioliterary background pivotal to understanding the writings of Chughtai. See also Qureshi’s excellent survey piece ‘Twentieth-century Urdu Literature’ where he traces the many literary and socialist movements that radically shaped the face of Urdu writings in the twentieth century (329–62).

5. A 2019 film adaptation of Lihāf by Indian filmmaker Rahat Kazmi, which debuted at Cannes Film Festival, is another example of how Chughtai’s story has been re-made in ways that highlight its appeal for LGBTQ audiences but denude it of its trenchant class critique. See Zoovia Hamiduddin, ‘Misunderstanding Lihaaf’ for an eloquent critique of the film’s poster.

6. Priyadarshini, “Lihaaf,” 68.

7. Asaduddin, “Alone on Slippery Terrain,” 85.

8. Tellis, “The Corporeal Aesthetic,” 135.

9. Chughtai writes: ‘I went to Aligarh after a long time passed. The thought of the Begum who was the subject of my story made my hair stand on end. She had already been told that “Lihāf” was based on her life. We stood face to face during a dinner. I felt the ground under my feet receding. She looked at me from her big eyes that conveyed excitement and joy. Then she cruised through the crowd, leaped at me and took me in her arms. Drawing me to one side, she said, “Do you know I divorced the Nawab and married a second time? I’ve got a pearl of a son, by God’s grace.” I felt like throwing myself into someone’s arms and crying my heart out. I couldn’t restrain my tears though, in fact, I was laughing loudly. She invited me to a fabulous dinner. I felt fully rewarded when I saw her flower-like boy. I felt he was mine as well. A part of my mind, a living product of my brain. An offspring of my pen.’ (‘Autobiographical Fragments’, 35; my italics).

10. See Metcalf, “Islamic Reform,” 194–5 and Deutsch, Muslim Women, 19–31 for a wider understanding of adab as an integral part of the discourse surrounding the familial culture and the spiritual training of a ‘good’ Muslim.

11. The opening description alluding to an unreliable memory of times past – bītī huī duniyā ke pardon mein – (‘Lihāf’, Pratinidhi Kahāniyān, 81) is rendered thus by different translators: ‘the dark crevasses of the past’ (Hameed 5); ‘the veiled world of the past’ (Dulai and Coppola 195); ‘the labyrinth of times past’ (Asaduddin 36).

12. Chughtai writes: ‘They were not able to put their finger on any word in the story that would prove their point [of obscenity]. After a good deal of reflection, one of them said: ‘This phrase … “drawing lovers” is obscene.’ ‘Which word is obscene, “draw” or “lover”?’ The lawyer asked. ‘Lover,’ the witness replied a little hesitantly. ‘My lord, the word “lover” has been used by great poets most liberally. It is also used in naats, poems written in praise of the Prophet … ’ (‘Autobiographical Fragments’ 34).

13. See Tanika Sarkar 190–91 for ‘the new woman’ in colonial Bengal. See also Tharu and Lalita 144–5 for a definition of ‘the new woman’ in the context of Urdu writing as summing up the figures of Rashid Jahan, Ismat Chughtai, and Razia Sajjad Zaheer in the Progressive movement who ‘questioned social restrictions and began to assert [themselves] in a male world’ (144).

14. Srinivasan, “Reading literary justice,” 108.

15. Khanna, “Gender, Self-representation and Sexualized Spaces,” 51.

16. I have written elsewhere of Chughtai’s sensitivity to the issue of class-based exploitation: in her memoirs, Kāghazī hai Pairāhan, she wrote: ‘When I had to deal with the wider, bigger world, I realized that upper-lower caste, religions and races are all a form of hypocrisy; the reality is the class, the rich and the poor’ (qtd. in Mohan).

17. Sirajuddin, “Lihāf,” 118.

18. Ibid., 118.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., 120.

22. Hameed, “Lihāf,” 6.

23. Tellis “The Corporeal Aesthetic,” 135.

24. Mitra, ‘‘There is No Sin in Our love,” 317.

25. Sirajuddin, “Lihāf”, 122.

26. Ibid., 122.

27. Hameed, “Lihāf”, 10–11.

28. Gopinath, Impossible Desires, 149.

29. Hameed, “Lihāf”, 8.

30. Ibid., 7–8.

31. Ibid.

32. Sirajuddin, “Lihāf”, 119.

33. Ibid., 120.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid., 125.

36. Ibid., 123–4; my italics.

37. Ibid., 124.

38. Ibid., 117; my italics.

39. Ibid.

40. Hameed, “Lihāf”, 10.

41. Sirajuddin, “Lihāf”, 121.

42. Ibid., 122.

43. Ibid., 121.

44. Asaduddin, “The Quilt”, 85.

45. Sirajuddin, “Lihāf”, 121.

46. Ibid., 121.

47. Strean, “Effects of Childhood Sexual Abuse,” 465.

48. Chughtai had read Freud but remained wary: ‘I could not bring complete faith to it. There is some fraud in Freud. My mind always has a nagging doubt. No matter how great an intellectual it is, I am never fond of giving blind trust. I don’t know what sort of habit it is that first I always search for loopholes in their work. Before compatibility, we should always take stock of all the incompatibilities … maybe the first word my mouth ever uttered was “why”, although this “why” has landed me in a lot of trouble.’ (qtd. in Katyal).

49. Sirajuddin, “Lihāf,” 117; my italics.

50. Ibid., 118; my italics.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid., 122; my italics.

53. Ibid., 125.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid., 126; my italics.

56. Dulai and Coppola, ‘The Quilt’, 195.

57. Sirajuddin, ‘Lihāf’ 121; my italics.

58. Ibid., 125; my italics.

59. In an interview for Mahfil in 1972, Chughtai says: ‘You know, when I first wrote “Lihāf,” this thing [lesbianism] was not discussed openly. We girls used to talk about it and we knew there was something like it, but we didn’t know the whole truth … When I wrote on this subject, I thought – how stupid of me! - that this was something only women did. I thought that men always went to prostitutes, but because girls can’t go to prostitutes, they do this. Really, I was very stupid at the time. I didn’t know about it because no one ever discussed it. They might discuss sex, but not this aspect of it, perversion’ (‘Mahfil interviews Chughtai’, 170–1; my italics). See also Gopal, Literary Radicalism, 66–7.

60. Gopinath, Impossible Desires, 151.

61. Hameed, ‘Lihāf’, 5.

62. Ibid., 8–9.

63. Ibid., 9.

64. Ibid., 11.

65. The All India Progressive Writers’ Association (AIPWA or PWA, for short) was formed in 1936 and held its first meeting in Lucknow, which Chughtai attended (she was doing her B.A. at the time). The PWA manifesto described the Association’s aims in this way: ‘It is the duty of Indian writers to give expression to the changes in Indian life and to assist the spirit of progress in the country by introducing scientific rationalism in literature. They should undertake to develop an attitude of literary criticism which will discourage the general reactionary and revivalist tendencies on questions like family, religion, sex, war, and society’ (qtd. in Malik 651). Chughtai turned away from the programmaticism of PWA’s ideology, proclaiming instead ‘I have never written on hearsay, never according to any set rules, and never have I followed the orders of any party or the Anjuman [Association]. Independent thinking has always been my nature and still is’ (qtd in Gopal 69).

66. Qtd. in Jalil, ‘Literary voyeurism’.

67. See ‘Mahfil interviews Chughtai’ where Chughtai recounts the names of some members of the PWA who supported her during the ‘Lihāf’ court controversy, while many others stayed silent or condemned her (172–3).

68. Patel, Lyrical Movements, 115.

69. Gopal, Literary Radicalism, 68; 74.

70. See Gopal, Literary Radicalism, 88 for a discussion of Chughtai’s ‘exasperated and forceful critique’ of the Progressive critic, Ebadat Barelvi, on the question of the provenance of ‘literary socialism’ as separate from that of working-class socialism.

71. Patel, Lyrical Movements, 74.

72. Between the four English translations I use, the last line as Chughtai originally wrote it is kept in only one – the one by Hameed; it is not there in the translations by Asaduddin, Sirajuddin, and Dulai and Coppola. In Urdu Ke Bihtarin Afsane, the Urdu edition printed by Indian Academy as well as in the Hindi version Pratinidhi Kahaniyan published in 1988, this line, in accordance with Manto’s criticism, is absent. Sirajuddin provides a gloss in the preface to his translation of the story that Hameed’s version alone so far is faithful to ‘how the story ended when it first appeared in 1942, in Adab-e-Latif and in a collection of Chughtai short stories’ and that subsequent to Manto’s critique, the story has always appeared without the last sentence about the one lakh rupees (128).

73. Manto, “Ismat Chughtai”, 204.

74. Ibid., 204–5; my italics.

75. Kumar, “Chughtai,”

76. Jalil, ‘Literary voyeurism’.

77. “Mahfil Interviews Chughtai,” 170.

78. Gopal Literary Radicalism, 66.

79. Katyal; my italics.

80. Gopal, Literary Radicalism, 72.

81. Hameed, “Lihāf,” 12.

82. Gopal, Literary Radicalism, 68.

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Anupama Mohan

Anupama Mohan is Associate Professor of English in the School of Liberal Arts at Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur. She is the author of Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012) and the editor of “Maritime Transmodernities” (Postcolonial Text, 2019). Her research interests include Indian Ocean Studies, working class literatures, the history of ideas, and the ecohumanities, and her essays have featured in journals such as Asian Review of World Histories, University of Toronto Quarterly, Indian Theatre, Intersections, and Postcolonial Text, among others.