Ismat Chugtai - A Life in Words: Memoirs

Ismat Chughtai (191191)lobbied relentlesslyand successfullyto get an education, struggled fiercely to find her own voice and wrote with passion and panache to depict the visible and subtle tyrannies of contemporary society and her conflicts with the values that made them possible.

Kaghazi Hai Pairahan (henceforth, KHP), generally known to be Ismat Chughtais autobiography, is a curious piece of work. It is certainly written by Ismat Chughtai, and it is about her life, her family and her growth and development as a writer. But it is not a straightforward autobiography inasmuch as it does not record the authors life storyfrom her birth to the point of writing the bookin a chronological order. It is fragmented, jagged, written in fits and starts when spurts of memory propelled her to record her reminiscences, without consideration for chronology, repetition or narrative coherence. Perhaps it is not realistic to expect a traditional autobiography from such an individualistic, temperamental and radical writer like Ismat Chughtai, who never moved on a straight or predictable path, much like the heroine, Shaman, of her autobiographical novel, Terhi Lakeer (Crooked Line).

The fourteen chapters of KHP, written for the Urdu journal Aaj Kal, were published from March 1979 to May 1980. The general tenor of the chapters and the manner in which they were written is illustrated by the following note from the author to the editor of Aaj Kal when she sent in the second instalment:

Im sending the second chapter. I am trying to record from my memory the events that affected me and what I had heard from conversations in the family, the tensions inherent in every class, new questions and their resolutionall this is so complicated. I will send you whatever gets written at any point of time. Let them be published under different titles. The sequence might be worked out while editing them [for the volume].

The writer did not have the opportunity to take a second look, much less edit what she had written because of other preoccupations

The span of the volume is limited to the years between when Ismat Chughtai entered high school to the time of writing her controversial story, Lihaaf. In other words, the autobiography records the events of only a couple of years of her life. Even with the addition of the opening chapter there are silences and gaps that cry out to be verbalized and filled up. However, within this limited timeframe, we find encapsulated vignettes that point to the multiple and richly tapestried cultural matrix that went into developing Ismat Chughtais artistic sensibility.

The real absence in KHP is any vignette from her married life, even though her husband, Shahid Lateef, figures in many places. One gets just a fleeting glimpse in the chapter, In the Name of Those Married Women... It is a matter of speculation as to why a brutally honest These questions will tantalize readers as they go through the pages of this volume.