At a time when writing by and about women was rare and tentative, chughtai explored female sexuality with unparalleled frankness and examined the political and social mores of her time she wrote about the world that she knew, bringing the idiom of the middle class to urdu prose, and totally transformed the complexion of urdu fiction lifting the veil brings together ismat chughtai's fiction and non-fiction writing the twenty-one pieces in this selection are chughtai at her best, marked by her brilliant turn of phrase, scintillating dialogue and wry humor, her characteristic irreverence, wit and eye for detail

Lifting the Veil

Literature & Fiction

ISMAT CHUGHTAI

Short Stories & Anthologies

Penguin

The Quilt: Stories

Penguin??Books

'Gloriously provocative... female sexuality within a patriarchal world is Chughtai's central concern' Kamila Shamsie, winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2018, from the introduction Lifting the Veil is a bold and irreverent collection of writing from India's most controversial feminist writer. These stories celebrate life in all its complexities: from a woman who refuses marriage to a man she loves to preserve her freedom, to a Hindu and a Muslim teenager pulled apart by societal pressures, to eye-opening personal accounts of the charges of obscenity the author faced in court for stories found in this book. Wickedly funny and unflinchingly honest, Lifting the Veil explores the power of female sexuality while slyly mocking the subtle tyrannies of middle-class life. In 1940s India, an unlikely setting for female rebellion, Ismat Chughtai was a rare and radical storyteller born years ahead of her time. 'Ismat Chughtai is known for her iconoclastic, feminist writings which explored the inner workings of women's lives' Huffington Post

Literary

Presented along with the vivid and high-energy descriptions of her childhood years are the conflicted experiences of growing up in a large muslim family during the early decades of the twentieth century we get an intimate view of a writers fierce struggle to find her own voice and depict with passion and precision the visible and subtle tyrannies of contemporary society a life in words is a searingly honest and compellingly readable memoir of the life of one of the most significant urdu writers of all time

A Life in Words: Memoirs: Ismat Chughtai

M. Asaduddin

Sorry Mummy

Vani Prakashan

This magnum opus is one of the most important novels of the subcontinent. The narrative draws heavily on the author's own experiences and revolves around the life of Shaman, born as the tenth and youngest child in a middle-class Muslim family where traditional mores and cultural constraints maintain an oppressive hold on the lives and behaviour of all its members. The novel exposes the social cultural conflicts and the psychosexual determinants that govern the development of female consciousness.

Crooked Line

Kali for Women

Collection of three collections by leading Urdu and feminist writer, translated by Tahira Naqvi. Includes "The Quilt and Other Stories", "The Heart Breaks Free", and "The Wild One."

A Chughtai Collection: The Quilt and Other Stories, The Heart Breaks Free, and the Wild One

Women Unlimited

One Drop Of Blood : The Story Of Karbala

The Collectors' Chughtai : Her Choicest Stories

This brilliant translation of Ismat Chughtai s original Urdu novel Ajeeb Aadmi is the riveting story of Dharam Dev, the famous actor, director and producer, and his all-consuming and doomed passion for Zarina Jamal, the young dancer from Madras whom he brings to Bombay and transforms into a charismatic actress. He looks on in anguish as his betrayed wife, Mangala, a well-known playback singer, sinks slowly into alcoholism. When Zarina abandons him, he is overwrought and dies of an overdose, friendless and alone. In an interview, Chughtai described this novel about the Bombay film industry as a story based on the life of a producer-director who killed himself after the dancer he had made into a star left him in the lurch. I go into why he commits suicide, she said, why girls run after him and producers like him, and the hell they make for these men and for their wives. This irreverent, sharply observed narrative of infatuation and ambition is vintage Chughtai.

A Very Strange Man

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Speaking Tiger

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Books by ISMAT CHUGHTAI