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Language in India www.languageinindia.com ISSN 1930-2940 Vol. 18:1 January 2018

India’s Higher Education Authority UGC Approved List of Journals Serial Number 49042
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Re-defining Sexuality:
From Object to Subject in Ismat Chughtai’s Lihaaf

Shikha Thakur
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Courtesy: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21842264-lihaaf?rating=4

Abstract
This paper demonstrates the imposed sexuality of women in patriarchal society, by collating
varied renowned feminist writers’ views to uncover the female sexuality. The paper not just
challenges the conventionally patriarchal institution of marriage but also explores multiple cultural

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Language in India www.languageinindia.com ISSN 1930-2940 18:1 January 2018
Shikha Thakur
Re-defining Sexuality: From Object to Subject in Ismat Chughtai’s Lihaaf 577
and psychological problems underwent by women post marriage. Through protagonist of the story,
Begum Jan, Chughtai, aims to voice the unvoiced and unleash the leashed. The paper primarily
represents the sexuality of women as a means to re-define her identity, by challenging the traditional
sexuality conferred to her, that in turn makes her grow from an object of despondence to the subject
of agency.

paper portrays the intricate relationship between the agency of gender and culture by
marking Begum Jan’s journey with stigmatization, commoditization and double marginalization in
the institution of marriage; which in turn results in robust subversion of the culturally gendered
patriarchal ideology. Henceforth, , Judith Butler’s ‘Resignification’, Mikhail Bakhtin’s
‘carnivalesque’ and Michel Foucault’s ‘heterotopia’ aptly substantiate Begum Jan’s gradual
movement from object of victim to subject of power. Her imposed debilitating femininity, and
negation of humanity, eventually results in transgression of the patriarchal protocols, thereby,
vindicating the fact, greater the oppression stronger the rebellion.

Introduction

Ismat Chughtai (1911-1991)

Courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismat_Chughtai
Ismat Chughtai, a pioneer of Urdu writings, known worldwide for her landmark short story
named, Lihaaf (The Quilt) 1942, was levelled against the charge of obscenity, for having written a
story from the perspective of a six-year-old girl, unveiling the same-sex desires. Her indomitable
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Language in India www.languageinindia.com ISSN 1930-2940 18:1 January 2018
Shikha Thakur
Re-defining Sexuality: From Object to Subject in Ismat Chughtai’s Lihaaf 578
spirit and a fierce feminist ideology made her explore feminine sexuality in multiple offshoots,
terming her a revolutionary feminist in twentieth century Urdu literature.

Lihaaf’, published in the Urdu literary journal Adab-i-Latif, translated from Urdu to English
by M. Asaduddin, is a story about a woman’s erotic relationship with the same sex, exploring a
unique narrative that reflects on a realistic aspect of woman, who declines to follow the master
narrative. The story gruffly posits the objectification of wife in the feudal society who in turn resorts
to lesbian relationship-female bonding as a core weapon to combat patriarchy and staunch
masculinity. For this reason, Ismat Chughtai in one of her interviews states, that Lihaaf “brought me
so much notoriety that I got sick in life. It became the proverbial stick to beat me with and whatever I
wrote afterwards got crushed under its weight”

Begum Jan
Begum Jan, a Muslim woman, at a tender age, gets married to a rich, much-aged Nawab who
was virtuous for not having entertained “nautch girl or prostitute in his house” (Chughtai 36). Post
wedding Begum Jan figured out that she was nothing more than an object in the house full of luxury,
as “he tucked her away in the house with his other possessions and promptly forgot her” (Chughtai
36) and relegated her to margins. Simon de Beauvoir, in her essay The Second Sex (1949), illustrates
how women are rendered the ‘other’ in patriarchal discourse and on the basis of sex, woman is
considered weak, submissive, emotional, vulnerable, and dependent, and is consequently, deprived
of her rights. The male-dominant ideology thus legalizes the victimization and marginalization of
women by men on biological grounds, which deprives women of their selfhood and make them an
object rather than the subject. This thrust Begum Jan to the arena of solitude and despondence,
making her question “whether it was when she committed the mistake of being born or when she
came to the Nawab’s house as his bride” (36 Chughtai). The post marriage events in Begum Jan’s
life baffled her to an extent that she started questioning her existence and identity. She was nothing
more than furniture in her house and was permanently silenced. All her sexual desires culminated on
seing Nawab’s disinterest in her and massive interest in “young, fair and slender-waisted boys whose
expenses were borne by him” (36 Chughtai). Begum Jan was victimized on ground of her sex by not
just Nawab but also by the relatives who visited the place, “she remained a prisoner in the house.
These relatives, free-loaders all, made her blood boil. They helped themselves to rich food and got
warm stuff made for themselves while she stiffened with cold” (Chughtai 37).

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Forced into Active Decision-Making
Begum Jan catalyses from passivity to active decision-making after spending endless
traumatic sleepless nights and dejected days in isolation. She then decided to give wings to her
sexuality, when Rabbu rescued her giving her a new meaning orgasmic pleasure, with the reins of
her life squarely in her hands and till the very end she fights to keep them there. Learning from the
early lessons of victimization, and objectification, she thinks deeply and crafts a strategy to turn her
life around and start afresh. Every day with Rabbu was an invigorated self-discovery with lesbian
orgasmic pleasure, for “soon her thin body began to fill out. Her cheeks began to glow and she
blossomed in beauty. It was a special oil massage that brought life back to the half-dead Begum
Jaan” (Chughtai 37). Thwarted by chance and malice repeatedly, she fights to live her dream and
responds to the challenges with quick wittedness and confidence. Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the
carnivalesque, as developed in Rabelais and His World (1965) helps “to subvert and interrogate the
established / institutionalized authority over meaning” (Nayar 23).

Subversion
In Lihaaf’, subversion can be understood primarily through the theoretical application of
Judith Butler’s concept of subversion of identity, as laid out in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity (1990), in which she challenges the patriarchal stance of confining women
within a particular framework on the grounds of their sexuality. Butler does so by using
resignification and states that the meanings and categories by which we understand and live our daily
existence can be changed because the seemingly “natural” is actually socially constructed and
contingent. Begum Jan’s transgression of boundaries for the reclamation of her sexual orientation
subverts the other identity imposed upon her by patriarchy, which is conflated with society/culture
that identifies her as sacrificial, feeble, and acquiescent. She redefines homosexuality as a weapon
for acquiring a subject from a treaty of object. To reclaim her autonomous identity, Begum Jan uses
her sexuality to assert her uniqueness and to subvert patriarchy. This in turn, aids her to affirm
herself as an individual and also to redefine her personhood, vis-a-vis her gender role, social space,
and relationships

Grows in Strength
Begum Jan thus rapidly grows in strength, cunning, and doggedness in the course of action.
Deprived of autonomy since long, Begum Jan learns from her lived experiences and begins to live
life on her terms. Well substantiated using ‘heterotopia’, the concept propounded by Michel
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Foucault, where he questions how the given space around the object, can define the object’s
autonomy and identity. As in Begum Jan’s case, the imposed societal space offered to her was
curbing her desires and dreams, for Nawab “was too busy chasing the gossamer shirts, nor did he
allow her to go out” (Chughtai 37), plausibly, this made her lose her self-worth and ruined her to
isolation, as “the frail, beautiful Begum wasted away in anguished loneliness” (Chughtai 36).

Silencing Begum Jan

However, Lihaaf’ mimics and parodies the othering theories and practices repeatedly to
completely subvert and debunk their validity, for all women subjected to“ ‘those naturalized and
reified notions of gender that support masculine hegemony and heterosexist power’ [and] are written
into our very psyches as well as into the dominant institutions of political and social life” (Butler
2485). Objectification of Begum Jan is silenced as she knows that there is none who can come for
her runaway, but there are ample instances that prove her assertiveness. As long as she is in the
custody of societal/cultural norms, she is marginalized, silenced, victimized, and deprived of agency
by Nawab, but when she steps out of enslavement she begins to move to the centre from the
periphery and to reclaim her subjectivity and agency. Chughtai’s use of Bakhtin’s carnival and the
ultimate other are clearly discernible when Begum Jan was objectified in the marriage institution,
nevertheless, fiercely resists any attempt at further objectification by the patriarchal society and
eventually liberates her sexuality in company of women, primarily with Rabbu and the narrator,
when she responds orgasmically “Ah! what pleasure...” She expressed her satisfaction between
sensuous breaths” (Chughtai 39). Ostensibly, Ismat Chughtai deconstructs the patriarchal
metanarrative and builds the architecture of her narratives to give female agency a clear and valid
voice. The narratology develops the central character as gradually energized to challenge the
imposed inequalities and to subvert the same.

Conclusion
In this study I have made an attempt to analyze feminine sexuality by subverting the
conventional patriarchal society that refuses to recognize feminine desires and fantacies. The
feminist perspective in Lihaaf’ by Ismat Chughtai situates her protagonist Begum Jan—in the
historical and temporal contexts of extant societal processes. The story delineates the
disadvantageousness and subjugation of women in male dominated societies and their discourses.
The discovery of sexuality is studied through the protagonist’s violent encounters with male-centred
society. She experiences stigmatization and double marginalization, imposed debilitating femininity,
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Re-defining Sexuality: From Object to Subject in Ismat Chughtai’s Lihaaf 581
to which she responds through her acts of transgression and subversion of the patriarchal oppressors
to assert her selfhood and recognize her sexuality. Begum Jan’s story in Lihaaf’ is a clarion call for
all women to seek a better life and pursue their dreams and potential. Begum Jan’s story
simultaneously reveals the deep rootedness of masculine oppression and the equally long resistance
by women through successive generations. Chugthai adopts a style of writing in Lihaaf’ which turns
a potentially maudlin and gothic story into a powerful multilayered narrative of uncompromising
female assertion and rejuvenated humanity. The story is illuminated throughout by the effulgent
female-bond of Begum Jan and Rabbu,. They reclaim and reconstruct their differentiated
individuality, re-present and reassert their femininity, and seek subject and agency which establishes
Ismat Chughtai’s contribution to the understanding of the development of complex matrixes of
masculinity and femininity through history, tradition, and literary expositions till the contemporary
feminist discourse. Thus, the feminist stance of the story brings in fine nuances in the interrogation
of the patriarchy and fortifies the feminist reconstruction of the self, in which gender identity
markers are diminished, the authoritative approach of male-centeredness is annihilated and gender
extremism is eviscerated, thereby unveiling and voicing the feminine sexuality in terms of sexual
desires and dreams.
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Works Cited
Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory. 1995. New Delhi: Raj, 2010. Print
Chughtai, Ismat. Lifting the Veil. Trans. M. Asaduddin. Penguin Books:2009
Eagleton, Terry. Feminist Literary Theory. Melbourne: Blackwell, 1986. Print
“Feminist Perspectives on the Self.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, 28 June 1999.
Web. 28 December 2016.
Making Gender-Just Remedy and Reparation Possible, Massachusetts: Isis WICCE, 2013. Web.
Moi, Toril. “Feminist, Female, Feminine.” The Feminist Reader Essay in Gender and the Politics of
Literary Criticism. Ed. Catherine Belsey, and Jane Moore. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
torilmoi.com. Web. 18 December 2015.
Nayar, Pramod K. Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory.New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2010. Print.
Robbins, Ruth. Literary Feminisms. London: Palgrave, 1998. Print.
“Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War.” The State of the World’s Children. Unicef. 1996. Web. 11
November 2015..
Warhol, Robyn R. and Diane Prince Herndl. Ed. Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and
Criticism. America: Rutgers UP, 1997. Print.
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Shikha Thakur
Assistant Professor
Lovely Professional University
Jalandhar - Delhi G.T. Road
Phagwara 144411
Punjab
India
[email protected]

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