154. Ismat Chughtai - The Quilt and Other Stories with Tania Malik

AMY HELMES: Welcome to another episode of Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great works by forgotten women writers. I’m Amy Helmes…

KIM ASKEW: And I’m Kim Askew. Regular listeners of this show will probably remember an episode we did last year on Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a lifelong collaborator with Merchant and Ivory. She was married to an Indian, lived in India for several decades and wrote about her experiences there, but she was actually German. It’s a common misconception that she was an Indian writer. (That’s episode #93 If you want to go back later and have a listen.)

AMY: Today we will be focusing on one of India’s own lost ladies of lit. (Or maybe we should say an author who is unknown to many westerners). She’s an iconoclastic writer of the early 20th century who’s considered the “Grande Dame of modern Urdu fiction.” 

KIM: Ismat Chughtai was one of the boldest and most outspoken writers of her day. Her cleverly-crafted short story “The Quilt” sparked a years-long obscenity trial, but it also helped establish her as a writer who wasn’t afraid to shine a light on taboo subjects and speak frankly about women’s experiences both in the traditional and modern Indian world.

AMY: Time to peek under the covers, if you’ll pardon the pun, to learn more about Chughtai. We’ve got another Indian-born author with us to discuss her.

KIM: Yes, it’s time to raid to the stacks and get started!

[intro music plays]

 Our guest today is Tania Malik, who was born in New Delhi and raised in India, Africa, and the Middle East. She now divides her time between San Francisco and Milwaukee, where she writes for outlets including Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Salon, Calix Journal, and other publications. Publishers Weekly called her 2014 novel Three Bargains honest and astounding. And her most recent book, Hope You Are Satisfied, is a suspense story set in Dubai, which NPR recently recommended in their summer reads list. Yay. If you loved HBO's White Lotus, you would probably enjoy the vibes of this book, listeners. Tania we're so glad to have you on the show and we're particularly happy to get to discuss an Indian author with you. 

TANIA MALIK: Thank you so much for having me on. I have admired this podcast for a long time and have been introduced to so many new writers with your podcast, so I'm very excited to be on. Thank you.

audioAmyFowler11475091194: So you were educated at boarding schools in the foothills of the Himalayas, which may or may not be relevant to our discussion, but it sounds so cool. It actually reminds me of Out of Africa: I had a farm at the hills of Ngong, or whatever it's called.

AMY: Was Ismat Chughtai part of the curriculum when you were in school? Or what was your first introduction to her? At

TANIA: I wish she had been part of the curriculum. You know, it was a Catholic boarding school run by Irish Catholic nuns and their reading curriculum leaned more towards Dickens and Shakespeare. Besides, I think the nuns would have been scandalized by Chughtai's writings, especially the way she wrote about, you know, women's sexuality. So, yeah, I wish she had been part of the curriculum, but she was not. But... I came to know her in a very roundabout way. My father introduced me to the writings of Saadat Hasan Manto, who was a contemporary of hers. And when I was reading about him, I came across her name, and I said, Wait a minute. Who is this writer? When you read that someone's writings were considered indecent, you know, you're curious at once, and you want to read them immediately. So I started looking more into her, and then I, you know, saw that she wrote screenplays, and I did recall her from movies I had seen as a child. But the contradiction of this person who wrote such incisive and, you know, nuanced fiction, you know, was also writing these heavy-handed Bollywood movies was quite a contradiction to me. But the more I read about her fiction, the more of a fan I became.

KIM: All right. Let's talk a little bit about her background. So Ismat Chughtai was born in 1915 in Badaun, India, which isn't too far from New Delhi in Northern India. And Amy and I admittedly don't know very much about India that isn't the British colonial perspective, sad to say, let alone about Indian literature. So is there anything we should know about the Urdu literary tradition to maybe better understand her and her literary significance?

TANIA: Urdu literature, you know, evolved from and Arabic literature, and it has a very long and storied history and encompasses many genres. For example, one of the forms of Urdu literature is the Ghazal, which is a kind of poetry that speaks a lot to love and spirituality. But the other very important form is storytelling. And this was a tool used by Urdu writers, especially when the British ruled India. They used it to spread the resistance and the rebellion and to encourage a national identity. And even after the partition of India, when, you know, Urdu became the national language of Pakistan, it still very much flourished in India. But Chughtai, she grew up in a colonized India in a time when you were a second class citizen in your own country and had almost no rights. And she was a woman as well. And she was born in a conservative and patriarchal society, so I think it definitely made her the writer she was. She was very outspoken and unapologetic in her writings, in her opinions. And the universality with which she wrote about women's experiences still holds ground today, I think. And she was considered, she is considered one of the four pillars of Urdu fiction. It has to be noted, though, that the other three are men. She is the only woman.

KIM: Okay. Interesting. Okay.

AMY: At least we got one woman in. One woman holding up the building. 

KIM: Yeah. As usual. Yeah.

TANIA: There always has to be one in the room. 

KIM: Mm hmm. Yep.

AMY: ha. So what do we know about her early years, her childhood, and how it might have shaped the writer she would go on to become?

TANIA: Well, she was born in a kind of a middle class Muslim family. Her father was a civil servant. And she was one of among 10 children, and she was one of the younger children, I believe. Her older sisters got married off when she was young, and they left the house. So she grew up in the company of her brothers. And I think you can really see how this exposure to this frank conversation of these men really influenced her writing style. And for a Muslim household, I think they were not very segregated, you know, the men and the women. So there was a lot of mixing between the sexes, and she got to climb trees and play football in the streets and do other activities which probably, girls at that time, they were forbidden to do. I think most importantly, her father supported her education, even when he said that he would be ostracized and that educating a girl was even worse than prostituting them. And so, you know, he did support her, he let her go to college. I think that was very important for her. She had an older brother who was already an established writer by the time she was a teenager, and he was a modernist and a very liberal thinker. And so I think when you have someone dear to you who is an example of what a writer should be, , that must have influenced her in some way. And he did become her first mentor.

KIM: That's great.

AMY: Yeah, it sounds like conversation around the dinner table in that household, nothing was off limits, you know. There was no taboo. You could just be open and all kinds

TANIA: Right. Yeah. And they've talked about sex, which is, I can't imagine my grandparents ever mentioning the word or even 

AMY: No. Yeah, exactly. Ha ha ha. Um, so speaking of this older brother, after her first work was published, people actually assumed that he had been the one to write it. 

TANIA: Yes. I think no one could believe that a woman had written, you know, the subject she had written about, nor in the style that it had been written in. Uh, you know, her brother was an inspiration and influence. So he probably had, you know, some impact on her writing style, at least initially. The misconception, I believe, started when her first story was published and everyone saw the name Chughtai and said, Why did he change his first name? But she was writing about things she saw and observed and what no one would talk about. No one could conceive that a woman would do that. She joked about her brother as well, that he said, “Who is this person writing in my name and my style?” You know, so, but yeah, even while he was a progressive thinker, he was still a man. And so she was able to shine a light more intimately and accurately on the women's issues in her stories.

KIM: And speaking of progressive, in her mid twenties, she became associated with the Progressive Writers Movement. How did the connections with this group impact her? What were some of her other major literary influences?

TANIA: So the Progressive Writers Movement, I think she attended the first meeting when she was in college, and it was an association of writers who were hoping to bring about political and social change through literature and highlight, um, issues with marginalized communities. It was here that she met Rashid Jahan, who was a doctor and a political revolutionary. And she was just blown away by the way Jahan would just speak her mind, and she just loved her, you know, her fiery writings and speeches and the tone of her voice. I think Jahan really inspired her to write challenging female characters. And she really wanted to be very much like Jahan. She was very much an impact on Chughtai for the rest of her life. But at college, Chughtai read voraciously, not only a wide range of Urdu writers, but also, you know, Somerset Maugham and Dostoevsky and Thomas Hardy, and I think they all had a great impact on her. She says that she learned the conventions of storytelling from O. Henry, and you can certainly see the similar wit, and then the similarity in the way they have their characters, um, you know, creative solutions to get out of difficult situations. There is a lot of similarity there.

AMY: Oh yeah, for sure. You definitely see the connection.

KIM: Mm hmm.

AMY: Chughtai was the first Indian woman to obtain both a BA and a BT, which is a bachelor's degree in teaching. She became the headmistress of an all girls school and then eventually she moved to Bombay and became an inspectress of schools, which sounds very impressive. In 1942, when she was 29 years old, she married a film director. Her family was... vehemently opposed to the match, but she later said that she married him not for love, but for independence. And I found that really interesting because it seemed like it could almost be a plot from one of her stories, don't you think?

TANIA: Absolutely. Yes. She was determined to go to college. She even threatened to run away from home if she couldn't continue her education. And she did meet her husband when she was getting her teaching degree. And later when he proposed, he was at that time in the film industry, he was writing dialogue for the Bombay talkies. I think her family disapproved because anything to do with the film industry kind of had this whiff of disrepute about it. It wasn't something appropriate for a young girl from an upstanding family. But there were very limited options for her as a single woman at that time, and when she got married, she got to move to Bombay or Mumbai, as it's now known, it was a much more cosmopolitan city. And it gave her a chance to write a lot more and work, to be a working woman. And I believe, like, when he proposed to her, she said something to the effect of I've been trying my whole life to cut the chains that fetter me, and so I don't want to take on this other shackle that is marriage. Um, so he must have known, especially from that statement, that he was getting an independent spirit. 

KIM: Yeah, yeah. So just prior to marrying, she publishes the story we mentioned in our intro in it's called “"Lihaaf",” or “The Quilt,” as we know it in English. So suffice to say the Indian world kind of freaked out at the publication of this story. I mean, when I read it, I knew nothing about it. I try not to find out anything about the writer or the book before I read them so I can just take it in. And I was so surprised. 

AMY: Yeah, so let's dive into it, and then we can branch off to some of her other stories. But Tania, do you want to summarize what “The Quilt” is about?

TANIA: Of course. The story, like you say, did freak everyone out and it landed Chughtai in court on obscenity charges. The story is told from the point of view of a young girl who goes to stay with her aunt while her mother is out of town. And the aunt is married to a wealthy man. Now, as we learn, this man is neglectful of his wife and is busy entertaining young men rather than paying attention to his marriage. And you know, women at that time, their one duty in life was to get married and be a wife. And this aunt is unable to fulfill that duty. She gets despondent. And all that can help her are the oil massages from her maid. Now when this young girl comes to stay with her aunt, she's sleeping in a cot next to the aunt's bed. And she's awoken at night by the quilt moving in a way that frightens her. And when she calls out, her aunt says, Go back to sleep. And we come to understand what is really happening between the aunt and the maid.

KIM: Yes, listeners. It's what you think. 

TANIA: Exactly. Yeah. It's only a few pages long, but it touches on all these things like gender and class imbalance and, you know, women's sexuality, the frustration and suppression in heteronormative marriages and even just, like, loneliness and friendship. And it does go into some darker territory when the aunt's attention does briefly land on the young girl as well.

KIM: Definitely. It's interesting that there's a young girl as a narrator because you're seeing it through her eyes, not quite understanding, and you're having to make the connections almost. Why do you think she did it that way?

TANIA: It must be because a child is an innocent figure and relates what she sees without judgment. You know, when a child speaks, unfiltered and uncensored. and we are the ones who are making all the connections and , the child is not doing any deciphering. We are doing all the deciphering, which is very interesting.

KIM: Yeah.

TANIA: But at the same time, there is some kind of discomfort, because you are understanding all of this from a child's point of view. And she never let you out of that discomfort.

KIM: Yeah. That's true. 

AMY: Think about the leeway that this gives in terms of publishing this story, because it's not really explicit in the language. The child doesn't know what's happening, so the child says the covers are moving, and it's like an elephant and what's going on you know, the shadow of the blanket and there are sounds Yeah. So it gave her the freedom. Although still she landed in court, but, you know, ostensibly it allowed her to go farther by using this child's point of view.

TANIA: Oh, yes, absolutely. And I think, you know, that imagery of an elephant moving under the quilt is so childlike and so sweet and innocent. Like, she is so confused about what is going on. You feel sympathy for her as well, but at the same time, for the aunt and the maid, too, and the situation they are in, they have kind of formed this makeshift family, you know, because there are these two women who are relegated to the seclusion of their side of the house, and how they support each other and help each other in many ways. But yes, having the child tell us all of this just through her very basic understanding, actually non understanding, of what is going on was a very interesting device.

KIM: Yeah. It's kind of darkly funny. I would say there's definitely humor.

AMY: Yeah, but 

KIM: got a darkness to it. 

AMY: I just read it another time before we hopped on this call, and this most recent time reading it, it was far more disturbing to me. I think I honed in a lot more on the child abuse, you know, that was actually going on. It's kind of unclear how far it was taken because again, it's a child describing it, but it wasn't good, you know, and it becomes almost more and more like a horror story. The child is frightened and she doesn't want to be alone in the room with her and 

KIM: Yeah.

Yeah. 

TANIA: She is very and she does kind of say things that a child who is put in sexual situation in which they do not know how to express themselves, you know, they want to call their mother, they want to call an adult, but they don't know what they're going to say about it. Um, I think also, at the beginning of the story, how she opens the story, we meet the child narrator as an adult who kind of slyly says, I'm not going to tell you about the liaisons I've had in my own quilt, but, uh, the quilt is reminding me of this incident from my childhood. And I actually feel that's Chughtai's way of saying, yes, the child was probably very traumatized and confused when she was younger, but she's now grown up and she almost has sympathy for her aunt. She understands so much more of what the aunt and the maid were going through as being an adult. And she now doesn't judge it and is not as traumatized as you would think, because of the understanding that has come with age.

AMY: Yeah, and I think as a reader, you're having all these same questions in your head. You're having sympathy. You're seeing how kind of awful it is at the same time. But, you're right, at the very end, there is that little kick of humor. Why don't you just read the last few paragraphs. 

TANIA: Absolutely. I'd love to. So this is, uh, the young child again, she's sleeping next to the aunt in her cot, and she's awoken again at night. 

Once again, the quilt started billowing. I tried to lie still, but it was now assuming such weird shapes that I could not contain myself. It seemed as if a frog was growing inside it and would suddenly spring on me.

“Ami!” (That means mother.) I spoke with courage. But no one heard me. The quilt, meanwhile, had entered my brain and started growing. Quietly creeping to the other side of the bed, I swung my legs over and sat up. In the dark, I groped for the switch. The elephant somersaulted beneath the quilt and dug in. During the somersault, its corner was lifted one foot above the bed.

Allah! I dove headlong into my sheets. What I saw when the quilt was lifted, I will never tell anyone. Not even if they gave me a lakh of rupees. 

And a lakh is a lot of money. It's about a hundred thousand. So…

KIM: Wow. So great. 

AMY: I feel like every kid does have that realization when you first hear about sex in any way shape or form. A little bit horrified, a little bit grossed out, you know, so

KIM: So, the story first appeared in a literary journal. Um, what was the initial reaction to it? Do you know?

TANIA: Well, the story caused tremendous controversy, as you can imagine, and it was condemned by many readers and critics. Her publisher received so many letters calling her all sorts of names. I think it frightened her to a certain extent. And as the story goes, she's at home a couple of months after the birth of her daughter, and she's warming milk for her two month old, and there's a knock on the door and there's a policeman and he has these summons. She is being charged with obscenity by the British court, because at that time the British still ruled India. Interestingly, Saadat Hassan Manto, who I mentioned earlier, who was her contemporary and fellow writer, was charged at the same time. So they were both dragged into court on obscenity charges for stories they had written. The court did give them the chance to apologize formally and avoid any serious consequences, but they chose to contest the charges and they appeared in court together. She does tell this funny story about Manto, and he had been accused of using the word bosom in his story. And he jumps up in court and says, “What do you expect me to call a woman's breasts? Peanuts?” So…

AMY: That's hilarious.

TANIA: It was all very ridiculous. I think in Chughtai's case, her lawyer argued that there wasn't any explicit suggestion of a sexual act or lesbianism, and there was no profanity used. So her charge was dismissed on the basis that there were no four letter words in the story. Interestingly, I have to note, there was no furor over the fact that the husband in the story was entertaining these young men. All the invective was kind of targeted towards the woman in the story.

KIM: Of course. 

AMY: Because that's so obvious in the story as well. Like, he's hanging out with all these good looking young boys. 

Yeah, 

funny. 

KIM: Could there have been serious ramifications for her if things had gone another way in the trial? Or at that point, was it more of just kind of a farce? 

TANIA: No, I think it could have gone in all sorts of directions, up to like a big fine and jail time. I think the whole thing did disturb her tremendously. She did base the character on a woman she had heard about from her hometown neighborhood. And years later, she ran into this woman at a social gathering. And she was a little concerned about how the woman would react, but this woman embraced her and said that after reading the story, she had been inspired to change her life. She had gotten out of her toxic marriage, she had remarried, she had had a son and she introduced Chughtai to her toddler. And I think that did hearten her a bit. Because between the court case and the backlash, I think Chughtai was derailed for some time. She never came to regret the story, but she did go on to say that she was forever pigeonholed by it and that everyone had just read this story only or heard about it, and they couldn't think of her as anything more than the quote unquote obscene writer of “"Lihaaf".” She did say something to the effect of It was used as a proverbial stick to beat me with, and anything I wrote after that, I was buried under the weight of it.

AMY: And it was one of her earliest pieces, right, to be published?

TANIA: It was. 

AMY: So imagine being a new writer and having this huge brouhaha surrounding it and being so young. 

TANIA: Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people around her, like her husband was like, “Why don't you apologize?” Friends were saying, “Why don't you apologize?” You know, “Get out of it.” And, she stuck to her guns and she chose to contest the case, being this lone woman appearing there, even though Manto was there with her. But they had to get these lawyers and go to Lahore, which is now in Pakistan, and appear in court. She believed in her story and she believed in her words. And she always said, I'm just writing what I see and what I heard about.

KIM: That's so brave. Really brave. 

AMY: Yeah, and didn't she say something like, Why would you want to sweep all these taboos under the rug? Like, let's air them out, let's shine a light on it all and talk about it.

TANIA: . Yeah. She had this way of turning this, magnifying glass on this very conventional side of life. Um, I know you did an episode on Jhabvala, and she kind of had the same thing where she had this kind of insider's look, but this outsider's detachment almost in her writing. 

AMY: And we actually reached out to Ruth Jhabvala's daughter. To see if they might have ever crossed paths in their lifetime, um, and she checked with her sisters and they ultimately thought that they wouldn't have met because they lived in different parts of India and were in different social circles. But she said (her name is Firoza, Ruth's daughter) she said she was excited that we were doing this episode because she's like, “The Quilt” is brilliant. You know,

so. 

TANIA: Oh, that's so interesting to hear, yeah.

AMY: Yeah. And listeners, I'm sure you're very intrigued now by this story. If you would like to check it out, as well as the others from Chughtai that we're going to still be discussing today, there's a 1994 compilation called The Quilt and Other Stories out from Sheep Meadow Press, which includes an introduction by Anita Desai. And you can also just find The Quilt online. We'll link to a copy of that in our show notes if you just can't wait. 

KIM: Right. And almost all of the stories in this particular collection revolve around marriages and family relationships. Tania, what would you say are some of the other hallmarks of a Chughtai story?

TANIA: She was in essence a chronicler. She wrote about women from every socioeconomic class, every age. She also wrote about these women who lived in these segregated societies of their own. And they had this particular kind of vernacular, which was expressive, but a little bit coarse. And she used that to great effect in her stories. You know, I think she didn't do much of narrative interpretation, as we said before. She presented the stories in a realistic manner, and she left you to draw your own conclusions. Um, I know she has writings on taboo topics such as like rape and sex between women, teenage pregnancy, misogyny, uh, the evils of the patriarchal system. So I think when she wrote this literary realism, it made her writing accessible in many ways. It made it urgent and immediate, especially for the common reader out there. She had a very pithy, straightforward style of writing. And I think that did lend itself to her stories as well.

AMY: One of the things I noticed is these large Indian households, and all the interpersonal dynamics that that entails. They hate each other, but at the same time they love each other and a good example of that, it's called Choti Apa. It's about two sisters, and the one sister at the beginning of the story, she's kind of bitching about her sister and doesn't like her. They clearly don't get along, and she has discovered her diaries, and she is going to read through these diaries, and she's going to find some juicy dirt, and she's going to get her sister in trouble, and it's going to be great. So she starts skimming the diary, and as you go along we start to see everything that this poor sister has gone through in her dating life, I guess you could say, and all the different suitors she's dealt with, and poor treatment by men, things like that. And by the end of the story, the sister who's snooping has this new respect and sympathy for her. And I just, I kept going back to that one, it's my favorite.

KIM: I loved that story. Did you all see the movie Polite Society? It's recent. It's a British movie, but it's about two sisters. I don't know if they're Indian or Pakistani but it's about two sisters and one of them goes through dating. They want to get her married, and she has to, like, rescue her sister, basically. So it's like a kind of Bollywood action thriller. I loved it so much. And it almost feels like taking the story to the next level. It's so good.

AMY: I love that. I remember seeing the trailer for that and wanting to see it.

KIM: It's so much fun. I loved it. Yeah. But it totally reminded me of that story. 

TANIA: Yeah, my daughter saw it and she said the same thing. She loved it and, you know, just could identify with what she had seen when she visited India a lot, you know. Yeah, especially at that time, I think, you know, what was a woman's one job is to get married and run a household and, if you can't, if you kind of miss the bus on that, you're ostracized by society almost. So the stakes are very high.

AMY: Yeah, yeah. Another theme that I kept seeing was this idea of beauty standards for women and what happens when beauty fades. Several stories in the book have to do with this.

TANIA: I, you know, like I think The Rock and the other one I always go back to is Scent of the Body because there are maids in the household who are brought in to satisfy the sexual satisfaction of the male members of the household. But what is interesting in a lot of these stories, like The Rock or Scent of the Body is she highlights how hard it is for women to have any kind of sisterhood when, um, they live in a system which takes away all their power, right? They can't influence their fate. They can't influence the women around them, the men around them. They can't change their destiny. So their value is their physical form and their labor. How can they give power to another woman when it affects how much agency they have?

And, 

KIM: It pits women against women.

TANIA: Absolutely, they're living in this domestic system that encourages them to kind of mistreat the women, even if it is to their own detriment.

KIM: Yeah. And you've got the mother in law's and the new wives and all the tension there. Yeah, absolutely.

AMY: I have a good passage that's talking about this from the story The Eternal Vine, and it's a group of women sitting around and they are trying to brainstorm for who the next wife should be for a new widower that they know. And so they're like, We got to find somebody young, right? And they basically choose like a young teenager for this guy, who is like, What are you guys doing? She's a child. So one of the women says, “Dear God, brother, watch what you say. A middle aged man and a young wife in her twenties. Two or three children later, all the silver coating wears off. When surrounded by wet diapers, little will remain of this beauty, this coloring, or the tiny waist. The arms won't stay as supple either. If she doesn't begin to look your age soon, you can punish me as you see fit. I'm sure in another ten years she'll start looking like Bari Mumani,” which is his former wife who had kind of aged normally. So it's just basically like you have value until you don't.

And then there's another short story called The Morsel, which is similar. There's a woman who always sees an eligible bachelor on the bus every day. He seems like he's maybe kind of into her. kind of gets mentioned to a group of the other women in her life, and they're like, Girl, make over time. The makeover montage, right? So they put all this makeup on her, they fix her hair up in a big beehive, she's uncertain about it, but she's looking glamorous, I guess. And she gets on the bus, and the guy's there, and he proceeds to ignore her, and it's devastating, So Chughtai writes:

 When she arrived at the bus stop wearing high heeled gold sandals, swaying and tottering, she found stars dancing before eyes that were now bereft of glasses. (So I guess they've taken her glasses off.) Her whole body was drenched in sweat. Is it not enough to be a woman? Why should one need to stuff in so many condiments and chutney in just one morsel? 

KIM: Such a great line. 

AMY: That Indian metaphor. She does have lots of food in these stories. 

too. 

TANIA: yes. Yeah, I, I think, you know, reading about it, you can see that even for a Western audience, this is so identifiable where your friends are like, Wait a minute, hold on, we're going to work on this, you know, 

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: Oh, Yeah. I mean, we always make this comparison, but it's like Sex in the City episode 

KIM: Hmm. Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

AMY: The other theme was traditional women versus modern women, too. A lot of women getting traded in, like sort of the traditional conservative woman who's, you know, having babies and cooking and doing all the household duties, and then you have these modern, more Western seeming women who come in and swipe the husbands. But then there's always sort of a feeling of maybe the traditional wife was the way to go or, you know, that they've been wrongly set aside.

TANIA: I think what she's saying is that women can't win.

KIM: Yep. Exactly. Patriarchy. Yeah. 

TANIA: You know, between patriarchy and internalized misogyny, you know, it's like, you know, when you're young and beautiful, everyone is worried you're going to run off and cause a scandal. And then when you get married, like in this story, I think it's called The Rock, you know, you get married, you become a traditional housewife, then your husband starts straying.

KIM: Yeah.

TANIA: I think especially in that story where that happens, the husband keeps moving from one woman to the other and a younger, more westernized woman, it's almost like a kind of abuse, even though he's not physically hitting her. You can see how he is asserting authority over her and kind of getting this kind of perverse pleasure from being the better looking one, quote unquote, you know, the one who's fit and handsome compared to the wife who's kind of become slovenly and is only looking after the children and eating all the time.

AMY: And again, still kind of a concern today, you know, when you have children and you're exhausted and you're working and you're doing everything and Sorry I can't be a sex pot right

KIM: Yeah, 

Yeah, 

AMY: And it also makes sense, what you mentioned earlier, the O. Henry connection, and we do see that in so many of these stories, the ending has that little twist. 

KIM: Yeah. And Tania, I thought of this too in your own latest book, Hope You Are Satisfied. Um, I'm thinking of the scene where there's a jealous husband on a trip to Dubai. He thinks his wife is cheating on him and she keeps insisting she's not. But then the scene ends with her confessing that she had already cheated on him in the Maldives.

AMY: Yeah, I had the same thought as soon as I read that I was like, Oh, there's Chughtai!

KIM: A Chughtai story right there. Do you think she inspires her writing at all? No pressure.

TANIA: But how could she not? She writes in a way that compels one to consider just absurdity and the hypocrisy of the conventions that we are often forced to live under. You know , the women in Chughtai's stories are born into this world that they cannot break free from. They can't change the system they're born into. And so they're trying to make the best of the situation they're in. They're just trying to survive the hand they're dealt. And you know, my novel is about these guest workers who come to the Middle East, and this group of young people who are working in Dubai at the time of the first Gulf War when Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait and American troops start pouring into the region. And these young people, they are white collar workers, but they're low level and they're in an indentured kind of system. So I think that was definitely something I thought about when writing about these people, these characters who have to negotiate living in a world where they're considered insignificant.

AMY: And I think that's why it gets the comparison to White Lotus a little bit because it's like you have this upstairs, downstairs. Two segments of society and having to kind of kiss up to 

TANIA: Yeah, 

AMY: basically, 

TANIA: Absolutely. Yeah. I think everyone's like, it's White Lotus during wartime, which I

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 

AMY: Did you have a job like that 

KIM: Yeah, I was wondering the same thing.

TANIA: I did live in Dubai. My family lived there for many, many years. And so while I was in college, I would go back and forth, and I did briefly work for a small tour operator like that.

So 

KIM: That's why you've got it so well. Oh my gosh, yeah. You definitely made it feel very real.

TANIA: So I say everything is true, but untrue as well.

KIM: Yeah, sure, sure, sure. 

AMY: So we should add also that Chughtai did write novels in addition to all these short stories. Are there any that you've read or can recommend?

TANIA: Um, you know, I think what comes to mind is like her semi or quasi autobiographical novel, The Crooked Line. It is set against the waning days of the British rule when India has got its independence and is trying to settle on its identity. And the protagonist in the story, as well, is wrestling with questions of identity, especially when she's, you know, trying to break free of the secluded world and be an independent woman. What is very interesting about this novel is that it features these women's relationships with each other, how complex they are and how complex they can be, especially when the culture around you is changing and, uh, you know, you're pushing back against entrenched mores and values of your time. So yeah, The Crooked Line is definitely one I would pick up on.

KIM: Okay. Great. So, you talked a little bit about her connection to the film industry through her husband. He was already working on Bollywood productions when she made a career transition into the film industry as well. What else do we know about this part of her life?

TANIA: Well, you know, when she did meet him, he was writing dialogues for movies and then they did open their own production company. She wrote screenplays for him. She wrote dialogues for other movies and for their own movies as well. She got nominated for many, uh, Indian film awards. The film industry supported their life and she was grateful for that income. I think she always lamented that she didn't have enough time. Like, writers, they had to take up screenwriting work because they couldn't pay the bills by writing books, which is very much the case even today.

KIM: Yep.

TANIA: And, you know, and she understood the labor and the time that is required for writing. And so I think she did lament that fact for a long time. Yeah. But she, you know, after her husband died, she continued in the film industry. And, you know, like I said, I still recognize her from a couple of movies that I saw in my childhood.

AMY: Um, it was sad to learn that she suffered from Alzheimer's in her later years. When she died in 1991, she requested that she be cremated upon her death, and this was sort of another example of her defying convention. Right, Tania? Yeah.

TANIA: Yes. I mean, she was a nonconformist to the end. You know, she was a Muslim, and cremation is forbidden in Islam, because the belief is that the body should be respected in life and in death. And burning the dead is considered a form of mutilation and forbidden by Allah. Yet she chose to be cremated like a Hindu, and it was very controversial. I believe people refused to attend her funeral. From what I read, what her daughter has said, I believe it wasn't anything against Islam. She thought it was a good and great religion. I think she just did not like the idea of being buried under all this earth and dirt above her. I think that didn't appeal to her. And actually this is my own kind of idea as well. I remember reading that her friend, Manto, Saadat Hasan Manto, his writings were really reviled when he was alive and he was a pauper for a long while. He ended up in an insane asylum, but when he died, he was given a marble gravestone. And I think that hypocrisy rankled. She was like, Where were these people when he was alive? And when you're cremated, you're kind of gone. You're in the ether. There is no physical marker for anyone. Especially, I think, with the backlash that she received from "Lihaaf" is that there's no place for anyone to honor or revile you .You're just gone.

KIM: That said, do you feel like she's pretty well known among Indians today or not?

TANIA: That is an interesting question, because she did receive the Padma Shri in 1976, which is one of the highest civilian honors in India. So I think, you know, certain writers, uh, journalists, many readers of a certain age would know who she is. I think a lot of people would have to be prompted to remember who she was, and if they do remember her, it would probably be from one of her film roles. 

AMY: So we also understand that today the Urdu language and Urdu literature is under attack by certain factions of the Indian government. It's part of a kind of right wing agenda to marginalize Muslims living in India and to stamp out the Urdu culture. Is there anything you know or can add about this?

TANIA: Yeah, you know, with rising Islamophobia, unfortunately, there has been a pushback on Urdu language. The pushback is nothing new, but it has kind of intensified lately. Uh, Urdu is so much part of India. It's contributed so much to its history and its culture. It has such deep roots. And, you know, Chugtai herself was a very liberal Muslim. Her kids married outside the faith. She read not only the Quran, but the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita. I would just say that if we want to claim such great writers like Chughtai, like Manto, as our own, you know, we want to give them awards and honor them and venerate them, then at the very least we have to accept the language they chose to express themselves in.

KIM: Right, 

AMY: It goes back to her talking about the hypocrisy and not wanting a monument if you're going to be treating people this way. Yeah.

TANIA: Absolutely, yes.

KIM: Yeah. And, uh, also, as Amy mentioned earlier, we had corresponded with Firoza Jhabvala about this. She had brought up that Anita Desai, the writer, actually wrote a book about the demise of Urdu. It's called In Custody, and it was adapted into a movie of the same name by Ismail Merchant of Merchant Ivory fame.

AMY: Yeah, um, I guess we'll just end it there. I loved reading all of these stories by Chughtai. They reminded me a lot of one of our other Lost Ladies of Lit, actually, Kim, I don't know if you would agree with this or not, but Lucia Berlin. Just because there's so much pathos in them, and they're dark in a way, but then written in such a sharp, caustic, sometimes really funny style, and she doesn't pull any punches, like Berlin.

KIM: No, she doesn't. I hadn't made that connection, but I think that's perfect. I love that. Um, Tania, thank you so much for introducing us to Chughtai.. We loved this discussion. And I also just want to congratulate you on Hope You Are Satisfied. I loved reading it. I'm so excited for you and I hope our listeners go read it as well.

TANIA: Thank you so much. This was so much fun. And thank you so much for letting me talk about Chughtai, and I hope your listeners get to discover her as well. Thank you.

AMY: That's all for today's episode. Don't forget to come find us over at our Facebook forum if you want to interact with us and other listeners, all of whom are amazing, we should add. We like to share extra stuff over there, so if you don't want to miss it, come find us.

KIM: Yes, we'd love for you to be a part of it. Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.