“Ours was a remarkable family, uninhibited and aware, free from falsehood and cant…Whatever I felt, I expressed openly…one should learn to express oneself openly on the basis of one’s experience and observation, instead of towing the treaded line out of fear of defying the traditional norms. The culture of landed gentry had made the woman suppress their desires ,feelings and ideas.I have depicted these very women and their psychological contradictions.”Ismat Chughtai.(Negi, 48).
Everything that Chughtai wrote has the closet possible connection, with what she has lived through,
even though it may not have been her actual experience. Every play she has written has served for
her, as a function of acting as a means of finding spiritual release and purification, not just of herself
but of society too. And yet, may of the crucial experiences that helped to mould her consciousness
and give shape and body to her plays remain poorly documented. This is particularly true of her
plays.But we know tantalisingly very little about them.
Chughtai was aware the role drama and theatre can play in societies.Its oral and performative facets facilitate contact with the larger non-literate proletariat communities/population in India, and provide glimpses of resistant cultural practices at local level. Ostensibly, she was astute enough to understand, with the active presence of Indian People’s Theatre’s Association (IPTA) that drama and theatre as a terrain, that have exhibited its potentiality to inquire and challenge “authoritarian structures through the use of forms that have been creatively altered.”(Bhatia xxvii).
Chughtai, understood the implication of the mundane, the ordinary practices of a woman’s quotidian life, the domestic rituals of her home and the affection of her family relationships.
Chughtai was against orthodoxy, therefore her plays explore various themes such as: feminine sexuality, middle-class gentility, gender discrimination. In my paper, I argue how Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of doxa is conflated in her plays Fasaadi (Troublemaker) and Intekhaaab (Selection). My paper is divided into two parts-in the first half I briefly discuss doxa and the second half of the paper is the praxis-how Chughtai conflates this notion in the aforementioned plays.
Pierre Bourdieu in his Outline of a Theory of Practice, used the term doxa to denote what is taken for granted in any particular society. The doxa, in his view, is the experience by which “the natural and social world appears as self-evident”. It encompasses what falls within the limits of the thinkable and the sayable (“the universe of possible discourse”), that which “goes without saying because it comes without saying”.(Grenfell, 120).The humanist instances of Bourdieu’s application of notion of doxa are to be traced in Distinction where doxa sets limits on social mobility within the social space through limits imposed on the characteristic consumption of each social individual: certain cultural artifacts are recognized by doxa as being inappropriate to actual social position, hence doxa helps to petrify social limits, the “sense of one’s place”, and one’s sense of belonging, which is closely connected with the idea that “this is not for us” (ce n´est pas pour nous). Thus individuals become voluntary subjects of those incorporated mental structures that deprive them of more deliberate consumption. Doxa and opinion denote, respectively, a society’s taken-for-granted, unquestioned truths, and the sphere of that which may be openly contested and discussed. Bourdieu explains the term “doxa” in his interview with theorist Terry Eagleton. Bourdieu believes that doxa derived from socialization, because socialization also deals with beliefs deriving from society, and as we grow up in the environment, we tend to believe what society tells us is correct.
While doxa is used as a tool for the formation of argument, it should be noted that it is also formed by argument. The former can be understood as told by James A. Herrick in The History and Theory of Rhetoric: An Introduction: “The Sophists in Gorgias hold that rhetoric creates truth that is useful for the moment out of doxa, or the opinions of the people, through the process of argument and counterargument. Socrates will have no part of this sort of ‘truth’ which, nevertheless, is essential to a democracy.” Due to compromised opinions within a society, as well as opinions not counted for due to inaccessibility and apathy, doxa is not homogeneous, nor is it created agreeably. Rather, it is pliable and Ismat’s basic argument in the plays, Fasaadi and Intekhaab is that she has a strong investment in critiquing a traditional feudal social order but articulating, as well, the transgressive power of sexual desire, linguistic excess, and bourgeois individualism as each fragment disrupts the containing structures of marriage, law, and social hierarchy. Ismat’s strongest move is–however sketchily–to remind us of the historical specificity of dramatic writing: its emergence at the moment when a nascent capitalism and a residual feudalism coincided, producing plays deeply fissured by ideological contradictions: and she works hard to expose the ways in which society’s devices of closure and containment are insufficient to control the forces threatening all structures of stability. Perhaps inevitably, Chughtai is at her most iconoclastic when, in her plays, she scathingly reads powerful mystifications of a patriarchal social order in which inequalities of rank, gender, and property are represented as “natural” and in which the disruptive power of sexual desire is sidestepped by transposing wives into daughters and sentimentalising, without disturbing, patriarchal authority.
She presents certain social milieu to shape the psyche of human beings which reflect in the characters in Fasaadi and in Intekhaab. Both are autonomous individual texts but intrinsic personalities in place. Ismat Chughtai’s Fasaadi and Intekhaab are about the orthodox social upbringing and certain social consciousness of male and female. They break the stereotypical mindset and cultural mores of Indian society. Through them she reveals the human characters and psyche that’s still a taboo in our cultural milieu.
Her play Fasaadi (Troublemaker) was first published in an Urdu monthly ‘Saaqi’ in 1938.(Superscript1)Structurally, it has eight scenes.Moreover, there are nine or ten characters but the chief protagonists are three; one female and two males and the whole play revolves around them. Izzat, a twenty -two years old young lady, is simple and beautiful, but timid and extremely gullible. Ayyaz, a government employee ,is a credulous, sedate and a sincere man.He is Izzat’s childhood fiancé and the elder brother of Nishat, who is a real troublemaker. He is a man of about eighteen or nineteen but appears younger and has certain health issues. He is garrulous and a good natured boy. As the play begins, Izzat is residing at her aunt’s place. They are all first cousins and good friends and enjoy their lives fully. The story takes a turn when cracks are perceptible and Nishat is attracted towards Izzat, who is quite elder as well as his would be sister-in-law. He wants to marry her therefore he creates misunderstanding between Ayyaz and Izzat and also tries to ruin her image among other family members. Izzat fails to recognise that entire trap; she feels Nishat is an immature jolly natured boy attributes this to his truant ways. She enjoys his company and recognises the matter when Nishat kisses her. Her reticent nature comes in the way and she fails to protest. Hence Nishat becomes successful in his aim and destroys her image among others. Ayaaz is so depressed that he leaves the house and Izzat goes back and then Nishat aware from the reality of the world which is deeply rooted in orthodoxy which can’t change therefore thinks will remain the same.
NISHAT : She can’t accept me but I will not blame her because this is the
decision of our elders either she loves me but will marry to
whom they fix her in their opinion she was born for him. We all
are cowards, can’t raise our voice against of such injustice and
Mahmood you are lucky because your love is acceptable and
your relationship established by them. So that you have freedom
to express your emotion”.(Chughtai, 189).
After hearing such speech of Nishat all the members of the family do not endorse his thinking, because these are foolish talk and unacceptable in society.
Intekhaab (Selection) is a play which has five characters.The play centres around Khala Bi, the chief protagonist, a beautiful woman ,around forty or forty five, but looks much younger than her age . Her niece, Shameem is a simple girl but a true Indian beauty and an introvert. Her brother Wajid ,eighteen months elder to Shameem, is a simple man. Aalam is his childhood friend and a classmate.The play starts from Khala’s house where she speaks with Shameem and tells her to stop fraternising Aalam because he is a young man and that it will give a chance for rumour mongering Shameem detests her.Later on, it is revealed that Aalam likes Shameem therefore he teases her and talks to her. She conveys Khala’s message to Wajid who does not like Khala’s attitude towards Aalam. Once Aalam teases Khala and tells her about future in which she will marry again and have three kids, she takes it otherwise and attract towards him. After that incident she writes a letter to Aalam which unfortunately is read by Shameem and becomes a bone of contention among them.At the end, Aalam reads that letter and understands the story but without saying anything to Khala he also leaves the house even city and joins a job in another city. Khala Bi lives alone. There are two different plays but similar in the context of relationship and cultural mores.
This matter creates a dispute between childhood friends and a cause of break up with his beloved Shameem. The play is about odd relationships which is unacceptable in community and society. Similar theme is also explored in Fasaadi in which Nishat is sexually attracted to his elder cousin and would be sister-in-law. Therefore, he tries to spoil her image in front of the entire family by insinuating things, thus igniting the ire of the family against her.By writing such plays Chughtai’s intention is to reveal the realities of the society where such restrictions still prevail. In these plays she Her unique style of writing is inspired by the European writers that are reflected in her plays. She is a maverick not only in the matters of family but also in the liberal expression with regard to society.
Writers like Chughtai fearless expression clearly evince the influence of European authors on her. Apart from reading Russian and French writers-Tolstoy, Gorky, Chekhov (whom she intermittently read throughout her life), Maupassant and Henri Balzac, Emile Zola, she was impressed by Charles Dickens and deeply influenced by George Bernard Shaw.This proclivity towards him arose out of a sense of affinity.There was a thread of commonality between them-“ a puckish delight in shocking people out of their wits, outspokenness, clarity of views, combative attitude and a readiness to take cudgels against all kinds of car, hypocrisy and sham practised in the society.” (Asaduddin, 27).
She has the chutzpah to express the hidden reality of the society that was not revealed in such a manner before her writing. Her rendering of a typical Muslim middle class family has different markers, which include timid, coy young girls, college going boys obsessed with sex.She projected in her play, a female character who refused to live by old values, that is false ideas of shame and honour, one who is not prepared to sacrifice her life for the sake of a mere show of so- called respectability of her family or “Khandaan”.The theme of Intekhaab resembles that of Fielding’s Joseph Andrew in which Lady Booby is attracted towards Tom hence she becomes a troublemaker for him. Lady Booby is a look alike of Khala Bi who tries to spoil the image of Alam. She stops Izzat from conversing with him and gives a reason that it will destroy her image in society, but on the contrary she thrives in his company. Both plays are similar- both female protagonists are older than the boys they are attracted to. Moreover, Izzat of Fasaadi is similar to Celle of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple but her character is similar to Izzat at the beginning where both are speechless cannot defend them in front of society. But in the end of the novel Celle learns to give answers to the man but Izzat is unable to articulate and protect herself from her situation till the end.
Her existentialist and humanist perspective sees writing as an ethical appeal to the ‘other’ as reader-an opportunity to communicate the particularity of individual situations to each other and thereby surmount the anguish of the human condition. Her own textual practice of fiction writing from the late 1930’s was marked by her awareness of women’s alienated situation in a patriarchal society (Tidd, pp 99-100).
Ismat’s writings also exhibit similar concerns. She touches on all aspects of a woman’s life-her unwelcome entry into the world, her thwarted aspirations, suppression of her inner most urges and she also brings out poignantly her credulity, meanness and jealousy. All this she does with utmost cunning and subtlety, through the use of a language which is bold, innovative and incredibly powerful in its suggestiveness. She uses the linguistic resources of the spoken word and the idiom to the maximum and stretches out their potentialities to such an extent that any study of the modem Urdu language will remain incomplete without taking into consideration her contributions in this regard. Further she prefers directness of style to the strategies of indirection. She comes to the point directly without taking recourse to euphemism or skirting sensitive issues. Her tongue in cheek mode interspersed with wit, humour and irony enables her to treat forbidden terrains of female sexuality with a frankness and honesty unparalleled in Urdu literature and saves her from degenerating into exhibitionism and pornography (Asaduddin, pp76-77).
It is assumed that Chughtai’s works are based on her own experiences of society. She presents this lucidly and is considered to be a maverick in the literary world. So that, she gives the voice to characters at a time when the atmosphere was variant for such issues, and it was prohibitive to even think or discuss. But the end of Chughtai’s work reconnect the characters with present scenario again-it seems they are real, much like us. It expresses when both protagonists cannot do anything to clean the air and to re-establish their relation. Izzat leaves the house nobody stopped her even do not clear the image of her but they all are stunned after hearing the dialogues of Nishaat in Fasaadi. Moreover, parallel situation is in Intekhaab when Shameem and her brother leaving the house of Khala Bi and Aalam are unable to do any thing yet cannot recognise the matter why they are leaving the house in a hurry. Later on he also stumbles upon that love letter and understands the complete story.
Mean while there are various similarities in both works such as in both texts Chughtai tries to express odd attraction which is prohibited in society. As in Fasaadi a young boy of eighteen or nineteen is attracted towards his much older cousin. On the other hand, in Intekhaab, a middle aged woman of forty plus is drawn towards a young boy of twenty-two. In the process of achieving their target both antagonist convert into a troublemaker. Moreover, they are ready to pay anything for love and spoil the image of the characters among other so, in both cases they were the reason of break up. But at the end of the play, both the characters’ lives abundant and unsatisfying. In a nutshell all the major characters from both the plays, lead isolated lives in the end. Antagonists are daring here in both, Fasadi and Intekhaab try to at least change their life and creates hurdles for protagonists but at the same time leading characters are cowards, they remain calm and quiet and do not say a single word and the better expression is they are voiceless. They provide the spaces to such people to ruin their lives therefore in both the plays at the end are tragic they lead separated lives and there is no sign of reunion.
According to Patrus Bukhari, “Ismat is not well-versed with dramatic techniques or you may say that she has not yet mastered these techniques.” He opines that when she transforms the plot into scenes she does not streamline it with the accuracy that it warrants, -She does a shoddy job tearing it to shards with her teeth, so that the scenes look like frayed and tattered fabric. She is unable to wrap up her scenes after she has stretched them out – as though a train has stopped midway between two stations.” Leaving aside the dubious comments of Patras Bukhari, his comments are problematic.
These plays have a historical value as they bear testimony to the kinds of issues that engaged an Urdu writer who had predominantly endorsed the Progressive point of view and approach to drama consistent with that perspective. These plays also provide thought- provoking portrayal of a society in a state of flux within a particular period, with some sense of the human consequences, both positive and negative, of social transition. For the contemporary reader , they illumine issues that much of the world is still addressing: changing women’s roles, sexual liberation patriarchy and gender equality.Another critic asserts ,“While there are strong and provocative moments, they also seem thin and rushed, more given to strong local assertions than to sustained argument, and the threads by which Ismat links these plays to their historical context are often very frail. These are the plays that overreach themselves.”
Though her plays- Fasaadi, Intekhab Saanp, Dhaani Baankein, Aurat aur Mard, Banne, and Tasweerien, are very similar to her short stories, it is evident that Ismat Chughtai is a rebellious voice who has the courage to explore a realistic portrayal of society, in areas that remain untouched. She thinks and acts in an independent way, behaving differently from her contemporaries. She raises various sensitive issues which are unheard and untouched by the writers and one who did not flow with the tide. Her writing somehow is a veritable psychological survey in which she beautifully describes cultural mores and nature of human being which is beyond any imagination. It is this reason that her characters are deeply rooted by the conservative bend of society’s mind but at the same time there is a character that has dared to raise his voice against rigid belief like Nishaad. Thus Chughtai conflates the doxic elements as Bourdieu believes doxa is derived from socialisation, because socialisation also deals with beliefs deriving from society, and as we grow up in the environment, we tend to believe what society tells us is correct. Chughtai’s Fasaadi and Intekhaab prove otherwise.
Fathers or men, customarily in patriarchal societies power/control over women in both public and private spheres.Chughtai was fully conversant with the fact that patriarchy manifests itself from one society to another and from one culture to another.
Why Plays
Emulating the path traversed by Rashid Jahan, Chughtai too, engaged with one act plays, to primarily focus the realist pulse of middle class society in its multitudinous shades. Chughtai’s plays seem to have emerged partly in response to Muslim reformers’ construction since the late nineteenth century, of women’s roles as central to the household economy and as transmitters of culture, role that required women to follow household customs and rituals of Purdah and of Islamic law as it pertained to women.’( Minault , 5). She has convincingly portrayed the spirit of an urban middle class Muslim household by exploring the fame and fortunes of various persons who are an integral part of the joint family structure.They are written with such an intensity of expression, that the reader experiences a closeness to the characters and identifies with their pleasures and pains. (Chander, 174).
It is significant to note that the ‘social reform literature in the late nineteenth century was circulated predominantly through the medium of print in the form of advice books and vernacular pamphlets and was made available to muslim women who did not go to public places or schools'( Metcalf 1994:1)
Rashid Jahan and Ismat Chughtai, were both eulogised as two most important writers of Urdu
Through her plays, Chughtai, provides to her female characters the resistance of the zenana and the deracination of the patriarchal systems.She does not portray zenana as an exalted space for woman to the concept of zenana as an articulation of independence.
Reiterating the words of Ibsen, which best describe what Chughtai yearned to do- to ask” awkward questions” which could reflect the capriciousness of contemporary life.Two developments were brought forth by the influences of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud in Urdu Drama. Marxism was conspicuous by the founding/ formation of the Progressive Writers’ Association ( ), which had a substantial impact on a great section of Urdu writers like Premchand, Sajjad Zaheer, Ismat Chughtai, and Manto to name a few.It infused in them “a deep consciousness of misery, economic backwardness and political slavery and the need for fighting social ills on a literary plane.”( Hasan,145). Freudian influence is palpable in the focussed assiduousness on sex and many successful plays were written by Chughtai and Manto on the subject.( 146).
Chughtai was aware the role drama and theatre can play in societies.Its oral and performative facets facilitate contact with the larger non-literate proletariat communities/population in India, and provide glimpses of resistant cultural practices at local level. Ostensibly, she was astute enough to understand, with the active presence of Indian People’s Theatre’s Association (IPTA) that drama and theatre are a terrain that have exhibited its potentiality to inquire and challenge “authoritarian structures through the use of forms that have been creatively altered.”(Bhatia xxvii).By her own confession, she had never taken it to be her “mission to reform society and eliminate the problems of humanity” (Paul,127). She was greatly influenced by the slogans of the Communist Party as they matched her own “independent, unbridled, and revolutionary style of thinking”(127). Like her contemporary Manto, Chughtai was determined to humanise her hypocritical society rather aggressively.Both were concerned with obliterating the notion of the woman as a sex object, and they strove to endow her with a human personality. To achieve this it was necessary to launch an assault on the patriarchal society from all sides.Her plays may not meet high artistic standards that the genre demands, but she makes ‘adequate recompense’ with her sharp delineation of life which testifies to her seriousness and depth of her observations. In her plays, Chughtai explores human relationships, their joys and sorrows, their loves and hates against the background of the larger social world and its changing environment.(Sadique, 226).Writing in the realist mode she uses this canvas not only as the social and cultural matrix for the characters but also as the psychic landscape on which human drama is played out. She has written Fasaadi and Intekhaab and brought into their ambit the whole terrain of feminine sensibility with a sharp focus on female sexuality which was hitherto regarded a taboo.
Her style is extremely simple and effective.There are no formalistic complexities in them. Perhaps that is one of the vital reasons for critics to point out that the secretor Ismat’s creative power was embedded inter use of language and her unique style-“ like a long-tailed comet- that appears once in centuries.”( Alavi, 212). She uses the Begumati zaban creatively.
Chughtai, understood the implication of the mundane, the ordinary practices of a woman’s quotidian life, the domestic rituals of her home and the affection of her family relationships.
In her plays, Chughtai evinces her gift for what the Russian critic Constantine Leontiev called ‘psychological eavesdropping’. “Her meanderings into the inner psyche of her characters” and the connections with the outer pattern of their existence as suggested by her plays project the blending of Marxist thought with existential angst and Freudian precepts.We are plummeted not just into the actions of unfamiliar characters in the play, but into the strange progressions of their
The setting up of the All India Radio( ) and IPTA acted as a catalyst to a flurry of activities in theatre. Ismat saw this as an opportune time to use theatre and radio as a potent vehicle. She recognized the potential one- act plays and the radio plays had, to question and contest authoritarian structures. Like Manto, Chughtai made use of the radio to disseminate pertinent messages to women without extensive demands on the time on the audiences/listeners. Though Mahatma Gandhi’s clarion call did bring the women out of the confines of domestic spaces yet their participation in the nationalistic discourse did not unravel the chains of domesticity to which women were shackled.The primary reason being that the private space of domesticity was scripted as the ‘sacred’ and ‘spiritual’ in the nationalistic discourse.
Ismat impressed people with her spiritedness and exuberance.Though her plays are very few in number when compared to her prodigious body of work,I argue that they serve their purpose well.She entered the literary scene as though sounding a clarion call for awareness and change.Her plays too contributed in creating sensitive avenues
Conclusion
Woolf talks about women’s fiction and its subjects relevant to women, their married life and the number of their children. Ismat’s stories very well illustrate this feminist concern. The critics who object to the narrow range of subjects exploited by Chughtai ignore the times. Same justification goes for her that Woolf supplied for the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot. They were excluded from “certain kinds of experiences.” like that of war, business and politics. They observed the characters and realities in their house. (Women and Fiction 47) Encyclopeadia of Indian Literature states: Ismat Chughtai who ranks with the first grade modern short story writers of Urdu- Manto, Bedi and Krishanchander, is one of those writers who replaced idealism in fiction with reality. She claims that whatever she writes is not the handiwork of her imagination; it is what she herself has experienced, or perceived (Datta ,1989).
She writes against irrational taboos and checks that cause abnormalities and psychological complexes in young people, especially women leading a suffocating life. Ismat observes all these evils and overhears ‘revealing conversation’ of elderly ladies in the house, hiding herself under a cot or behind a curtain, and presents these life-like pictures “in a style that was at once disturbing and fascinating” (Datta, 1989).
What is the relevance of these plays, written nearly a century ago, in the contemporary world ? They provide insights into universal human experiences as love, longing, greed, confusion, fear, despair and triumph. These plays enable us to encounter an authentic voice, “who wrote out of her own lived experience , who provided a strong and compelling portrayal of that experience ,who spoke for a segment of society not previously represented in Urdu letters and who paid the way for a succeeding generation of women writers”.(Flemming, 207).In fact, “she peels off the layers of sexuality clinging to the identity of a woman so that her inner human self can emerge, lending crispness, boldness and a rebellious quality to her style and themes” of her plays. In each of Ismat Chughtai’s female characters exists “a woman who is not merely a nameless adjunct of the household machinery, but who while asserting her independence, shakes to the core, if not demolishes, time honoured values and customs.”( Agha, 196).
In the words of Michel Foucault, “…modern prudishness was able to ensure that one did not speak of sex, merely through the interplay of prohibitions that referred back to one another: instances of muteness which, by dint of saying nothing, imposed silence. Censorship” (Foucault, 17). Chughtai did not subscribe to these notions .
Ruth Vanita wanted to rethink “gender and sexuality to liberate humans into developing different kinds of family and living arrangements” (8). Chughtai’s works, in the same manner, allow us to think beyond the normative understanding of Love and Marriage and introduce us to an alternative spectrum of desire and identity.
Keeping this in mind, the paper would engage in a discussion on the works of Ismat Chughtai to show how Chughtai subverted the heteronormative sexual order through subtle yet vehement projection of female sexuality.