When I meet readers who know Ismat Chughtai only through her most famous short stories, I struggle to explain what they have missed. Ismat became part of my memory so gradually; I read her short stories, old interviews, her account of the infamous obscenity trial that took her and Manto to Lahore, and then her memoir, with an increasing sense of respect and affinity.
She became one of the great joys and influences of my reading life; somewhere between Toni Morrison, Mahasweta Debi, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein, Chughtai lay stretched out on her charpai, chewing ice, her notebook propped up on her pillow.
For those who have not yet had the pleasure of encountering Chughtai's work in full, Morrison has a useful word: rememory, which refers to those people and places that should be part of your memory, but have slid just out of reach until summoned.
My Friend, My Enemy: Essays, Reminiscences, Portraits (translated from the original Urdu by Tahira Naqvi; Women Unlimited) is an essential companion volume to Chughtai's memoir and her fiction. The 21 pieces here roam from the urgent question facing writers after Partition - how to respond to horror? - to pen-portraits of Manto, of writers from the Progressive movement, sketches of her childhood, peppered with her views on women (and the men who have too many views on women).
In Naqvi's translation, Chughtai's voice carries clearly across the decades, her humour and acute observations intact. One minor omission is that the date of publication for each essay is not included, though it may be worked out from context.
Instead of translating words like afsana, fitna, sehra, Naqvi follows the sensible practice of including a translation in brackets at first usage and continuing to use the Urdu word subsequently, or printing it in italics untranslated if the meaning is clear from the context.
Two of the great losses of urban Indian life are repaired in the first sections: the amnesia over the rich debate between the Progressives and the Modernists, and the vivid Urdu literary world in India just before and after Independence.
The communal violence after Partition was covered by so many writers working in Hindi and Urdu: Chughtai names Krishan Chander, Sardar Jafri, Majaz, Ahmed Abbas, Upendranath Ashk, Sahir Ludhianvi and many more. "How could literature, which has close ties with life, avoid getting its shirtfront wet when life was drenched with blood?" she asks; a writer cannot be silent in the dark times.
Ismat retains her usual clarity about Manto - their literary friendship spanned decades and survived Manto's drinking. "Manto is very fond of things that create an uproar and awaken with a start even those who are fast asleep…. Well, that will impress everyone, he will be famous," she writes. But when Hanif Ramay attacked him in the 1950s, she was swift to rebuke him: "Manto was neither a giant nor a dwarf. Not everything was for sale in Manto's life. Friendship, love, honour and privacy - he has not sold any of these values for pennies."
Chughtai's views on gender could be transported from her times into ours. She writes with keen intelligence on the heroine and her shadow sister, the tawa'if; with brisk scorn on the kerfuffle over erotic writing in literature. "It's not necessary to concentrate on every kind of filth imaginable… but what is so shameful about exposing a particular part of the body in order to soak up the sunlight?" And those who venerate women as goddesses, she suggests, would do better to imagine women as friends or companions.
There is so much here, from Chughtai's hatred of hypocrisy - the wide gap between what was embraced in private, denounced in public - to her swift dissections of the fiery literary debates of the time. But this collection is also a chance to see how she was as a writer, from the stories she wrote in secret in her childhood to her brisk pronouncements: "That's not dialogue, that's just the way we speak at home."
Her advice to writers was typical: "Write, and write so much that people begin to accept you as a reality." It takes a second before you feel the bite, and the truth, behind the words.
