""These days, ""said Ismat Chughtai to Shama Zaidi, ""national unity is being emphasised as though all the problems in the country are being caused by a lack of national unity... Bharat's leaders denounce each other, call each other names... If those in power are seen as thieves and looters, wiry should stealing, looting, violence not be regarded as elements of the national character? The public learns from them... this is national unity!""
Ismat first rebelled at age five, when she threatened to ""run away from home and become a Christian"" if her mother didn't let her go to school. She survived childhood ""by writing about my failures and feelings of hopelessness"". She ""fell in love many times"", just ""not with my husband"". She ""sought refuge in film heaven"" to make money. And she was sure that ""those who are incapable of writing themselves, become critics"".
This carefully curated, no-holds-barred collection, includes letters written by Ismat to her family, separated by Partition; notes to her daughters and her ""darling grandson""; correspondence with editors of Urdu journals in India and Pakistan; and even a never-posted reprimand to film actress, Saira Bano. At the same time, the eight in-person conversations are-marked by sparkling spontaneity, revealing Chughtai's personal, literary, and political preoccupations.
There is no relationship, no ideology-be it feminism, socialism or nationalism-that Ismat Chughtai didn't embrace with her quintessential irreverence and wit. Here, in this one-of-its-kind volume, Chughtai is truly outspoken. unapologetic, telling it like it is, in her own words...
ISMAT CHUGHTAI, rebel and iconoclast, controversial and courageous, is one of Urdu's most important writers. She is the author of dozens of short stories, four novellas; three novels, a collection of essays, reminiscences and plays; and a memoir, Kaghazi hai Perahan (The Paper-thin Garment). With her husband, Shahid Latif, she produced and co-directed six films, and produced six more independently.
TAHIRA NAQVI is a translator, writer, and Clinical Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, where she teaches Urdu language and literature. She has translated the works of Sa'adat Hasan Manto, Khadija Mastur, Hajra Masroor, and the majority of works by Ismat Chughtai, into English. She has published two collections of short stories, Attar of Roses and Other Stories of Pakistan and Dying in a Strange Country. The History Teacher of Lahore is her first novel. Naqvi grew up in Lahore.
Letters by writers have little meaning unless read in tandem with their works-one is incomplete without the other, and of course, the works should come first. Reading someone else's letters becomes a subtle act of voyeurism, permitted and accepted, because it stems from the need to understand, rather than to derive some kind of furtive pleasure: glimpsing the most private thoughts, seeing the little things, the unmade bed of the mind, the rough edges of the pen, the clutter of the personal, the inner life, all laid out, not for us nosy readers but for someone else entirely a relative, a friend, a child, a spouse, parents, editors. The list is long and we're not a part of it. Yet, the letters are now in our hands and we read with eager curiosity that which we do not know, and also to illuminate our own assessments of what we have read and appreciated, liked, identified with, been troubled and disturbed by.
Compiling letters, as we've done in this volume, is a relatively new literary form. In Urdu, Mirza Ghalib's letters represent the first formalised collection, published in 1869 in two volumes, and now known as Khutuut-e-Ghalib (Ghalib's Letters); they have been an important part of Ghalib studies. Compilation of the letters of authors and poets like Allama Iqbal, Jigar, Maulana Hali, Josh Malihabadi, Patras Bokhari, Ali Sardar Jafri, and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, offer us glimpses into the personal lives and everyday concerns of these writers. However, the publication of letters by women is not only a rarity, but when a collection did come along, like Safia Akhtar's letters to her husband, Jan Nisar Akhtar, written over a period of nine years and published two years after her death, by her husband, in 1955, under the titles, Harf-e-Aashna (A Familiar Word) and Zer-e-Lab (In an Undertone), male critics didn't know what to make of it. In a volume of the Urdu journal Nuquush, devoted to letters of well-known authors, the publication of her letters is referred to as ""a somewhat informal act"".
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