The World Book Fair, held at the Capital’s famous Pragati Maidan recently concluded in a most apt manner with the release of “Ismat Aapa” at the stalls of its publisher Vani Prakashan. The book in Hindi – edited by well-known writer and translator Sukrita Paul Kumar and young drama scholar Amitesh Kumar – is a veritable Ismat read as it contains all the essential writings of and on Ismat Chughtai, who had become a legend even during her lifetime. However, the year of her birth remained uncertain. According to her grandson, she was born in 1911 but most of her publications indicated 1915 as the year of her birth. The editors of this volume have settled for 1911.
The extent of Ismat Chughtai’s popularity can be gauged by the fact that most of her books have appeared in their Hindi versions (transliterated in Devanagari script) and have also been translated into English and other languages. Rajkamal Prakashan has published Hindi editions of many of her books including autobiography “Kaghazi Hai Pairahan” (Of Paper My Apparel) and novels “Ajeeb Adami” (A Strange Man), “Terhi Lakeer” (Crooked Line), “Masooma” (The Innocent) and “Dil Ki Duniya” (The World of Heart). Some other publishers like Sakshi Prakashan have published collections of her representative short stories.
Although Ismat Chughtai did not espouse any specific or well-defined feminist theory, she acquired fame as a feminist Urdu writer who was utterly irreverent and unmindful of the prevailing social and moral norms. She became famous, rather notorious, with the publication of her short story “Lihaaf” (The Quilt) and she was arrested on the charge of obscenity in 1942. She appeared before the Lahore High Court in 1945 and was acquitted. Soon, “Lihaaf” acquired an iconic status and she was hailed as the first bold, feminist short story writer in Urdu. One is not sure if such a story had appeared in any other Indian language till that time as it dropped very subtle hints about a lesbian relationship between an aristocratic woman and her maid who also performed the functions of her masseuse.
Although she had not started writing by that time, she found herself in a group of five or six young women who were taken by Rashid Jehan (of “Angare” fame) to a meeting of progressive writers where Ismat saw many top writers including Prem Chand. This was a preparatory meeting held in 1935 to launch the All India Progressive Writers’ Association next year. By the time she married Shahid Latif, four years her junior, in 1942, she had already established herself as a trailblazer in Urdu fiction. As Shahid turned a film director, she too wrote many scripts and screenplays. It is not a very well known fact that M. S. Sathyu’s celebrated film “Garm Hava” –whose screenplay was written by Kaifi Azmi and Shama Zaidi –was based on an unpublished short story of Ismat Chughtai. As the lovers of this film would remember, it is set in the famous town of Agra that was also the town of Ismat’s forefathers and, like the character of Salim Mirza played by Balraj Sahni, they too called themselves Mirza. Dev Anand’s hit film “Ziddi” and Nutan’s hit film “Sone Ki Chidiya” were based on Ismat’s stories and scripts.
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There were two jagat-aapas (sisters of the world) in Urdu literature and both happened to be top fiction writers. They were Qurratulain Hyder (Anny Aapa) and Ismat Chughtai (Ismat Aapa) and both wrote unforgettable pieces on each other. While Hyder wrote “Lady Changez Khan” on Chughtai, pegging the title of her pen portrait on the real or hypothetical Chughtai-Changezi connection, Chughtai titled her piece on Hyder as “Pom-Pom Darling”. Sukrita Paul Kumar and Amitesh Kumar have shown remarkable editorial wisdom by including both these pieces in “Ismat Aapa”.
The volume contains two of Ismat Chughtai’s very famous stories “Lihaaf” (The Quilt) and “Nanhi Ki Naani” (Nanhi’s Maternal Grandmother) as also three of her non-fiction, autobiographical pieces.
To give readers an idea as to how her contemporaries viewed and critiqued her art and personality, the book offers nine write-ups by noted writers including Krishan Chander, Saadat Hasan Manto, Pitras Bukhari, Wazir Agha and Mirza Adeeb. Extracts from her diaries, her letters to people like Jilani Bano, Ram Lal and Muhammad Tufail, reminiscences about her written by Khalid Latif, Mohammad Hasan Askari, Salma Siddiqui and Padma Sachdev along with a overview of Urdu short story by Joginder Paul have also been included in the book.
The editors have taken considerable pains to prepare a family tree of Ismat Chughtai and offer detailed information about the sources material used in the book. It will undoubtedly inspire the reader to delve deep into the oeuvre of Ismat Aapa.