Ismat Chughtai

She was one of Urdu’s most accomplished fiction writers - enlightened, bold, iconoclastic, progressive and feminist. She was not known much in the literary circles until 1942, (early pieces penned in the late 1930s)

Chughtai wrote about social, psychological and sexual problems faced by women.

"Lihaaf" was written in 1942 in Adab-i-Latif. The central theme - homosexuality. 

Although sensuality and (male) homosexuality was neither rare nor taboo, female homosexuality was unapproved - unless portrayed implicity and symbolically (like rekhti)

"Lihaaf" was considered offensive - to the extent that she was summoned by the court for alleged "obscenity"

Her area of best interest - "middle/lower-class women"

Her exposure to trade unionism and political activism was rather limited. She was not well versed in Marxist philosophy - not many short stories based on these themes. 

Chughtai was known for writing idiomatic and colloquial Urdu.

She was a tomboy - bold, courageous and outspoken.

Chugtai could not make her mark in plays - they posed some difficulties for those who want to stage them. According to Patras Bokhari, "she simply did not know how to separate scenes and acts." However, her brother's pen sketch is said to be one of the best pen-sketches ever written in Urdu.

She was cremated after she died - though written in her will, it still remains a controversy.

Tehri Lakeer- protagonist encounters and tries to overcome a host of socio-sexual conflicts which draw upon, but at the same time transcend and mythify, the author's own autobiography - 

a positive threat to their accepted norms of decency and morality -

appearances are deceptive, social morals are a matter of convenience rather than honesty and that sexual urge is the most primal and pressing urge of human beings driving them to all kinds of subterfuges -

how, deprived of a normal relationship with boys in the hypocritical and cloistered environment of home and school, these girls turned to each other for the satisfaction of their as yet imperfectly perceived and inarticulate, but nevertheless strong, sexual desires. 

tour de force in its forthright acknowledgement of female sexuality, its compelling account of sensibility under stress and its treatment of a precarious subject with utmost delicacy. 

Her practice of realism in her stories that sometimes borders on naturalism is geared to the exposure of social evils like polygamy, mindless conservatism, injustices to and abuses of women and defiance of what was regarded as undue reverence for the institutions of the past.

Chughtai continually ridicules despotic husbands who all-too-readily surrender themselves to debauchery but expect unswerving loyalty and faithfulness from their 'chaste' wives. 

Chughtai's stories one can very well trace the evolution of Indian women, more particularly Muslim women, from a faceless existence through education and emancipation to a far more independent and 'realised' life.

They derive their strength from the way the author builds up the tension between appearance and reality, between proclaimed public morality and private and personal urges. Chughtai shows that by discouraging and denying sincere expression of thoughts and desires, society compels the individual to practice hypocrisy and deceit and thus robs him of his dignity and honesty.