In good news to Ismat Chughtai fans, four famous novellas, offering valuable insights into the ways the inimitable writer develops her characteristic themes revolving around the lives of women, are now available as a collection.
"A Chughtai Quartet" comprises the novellas, spanning Chughtai's literary career from its early stages to the last years of her writing life -- "The Heart Breaks Free" ('Dil ki Duniya') written in 1918; "The Wild One" ('Ziddi') in 1939; "Obsession" ('Saudai') and "Wild Pigeons" ('Jungli Kabutar').
The novellas have been translated from Urdu by Tahira Naqvi, a lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University.
Like many others in Chughtai's stories, the protagonists in these four novellas are despairing in love and faced with tragedy when they try to cross social boundaries, seek and find agency in the exercise of an obdurate will that cannot be bent; and they cannot therefore be regarded as tragic figures.
At first, struggling against society's harsh mores, suffering its blows, these women appear to be hapless victims. However, even as they pass through fire they do not let it consume them. They achieve what we may not regard as "triumphs" in the usual sense, but which do translate into a victory of sorts; tragedy pursues them, but in the end they swim against the tide.
Chughtai berates the social ills that inflict tragic consequences on the women, but she does not allow the reader to pity them or feel they are a lost cause. She does this by highlighting festering mores and the maladies that infect society in such a manner that the relationship between victim and oppressor remains clear in its dimensions and implications.
The works in the collection, published by Women Unlimited, offer valuable insights into the ways Chughtai develops her characteristic themes revolving around the lives of women.
According to Naqvi, "The Heart Breaks Free", in which Chughtai draws on her childhood memories of life in Bahraich, is one of her best stories.
"Here, society is made up of the women in the narrator's household, aunts, mothers, mothers-in-law, housekeepers. Chughtai has repeatedly brought to our attention the cruel treatment that women dole out to each other," she says.
Together, the women of the household proceed to ruin the life of Bua, a free spirit who "had created a free world of her own where she ruled".
