Of the Zenana: Ismat Chughtai and the Feminist Utopia
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53573/rhimrj.2023.v10n05.001Keywords:
Utopia, Gender, Chughtai, Zenana, Culture, RealityAbstract
A zenana is generally read as a metaphor of male dominance over women. Marking a radical departure from this normalised perception of Zenana. Ismat Chughtai in her Lihaaf presents an alternative view. She destabilizes the association of a zenana with male governance and attempts to give it an altered dimension. While the popular readings of a zenana offer an understanding of it as a space to alienate women from the rest of the world, Chughtai in her Lihaaf uses the space as a microcosmic representation of her own world. This paper is an attempt to show Chughtai subverts a gendered space and establish a feminist Utopia around it. It muses on how patriarchy’s own intrinsic disparities produce it as a site of agential possibilities for women and create rooms for a feminist Utopia.
References
Chughtai, Ismat, Et Al. “The Quilt.” Mahfil, Vol. 8, No. 2/3, 1972, Pp. 195–202.
Batra, Kanika. “The Home, The Veil and The World: Reading Ismat Chughtai Towards A 'Progressive' History of The Indian Women's Movement.” Feminist Review, No. 95, 2010, Pp. 27–44.
Rae, Gavin. Poststructuralist Agency. Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
Chughtai, Ismat. "Autobiographical Fragments Excerpted from Ismat Chughtai's Autobiography Kaghazi Hai Pairahan." Trans.M.Asaduddinn.D.File:///C:/Users/A/Desktop/Tendulkar/Partition/Chugh/Autobiographical%20Fragments.Ht M. English. 9 June 2014.
Patel, Geeta. "Marking The Quilt: Veil, Harem/Home, And the Subversion of Colonial Civility" Colby Quarterly (2001): 174-188. English.
Gopal, Priyamvada. "Habitations Of Womanhood" Gopal, Priyamvada. Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and The Transition to Independence. New York: Routledge, 2005. 66-88. English.
Khanna, Tanvi, Gender, Self-Representation and Sexualized Spaces: A Reading of Ismat Chughtai’s Lihaaf Impact: International Journal of Research in Humanities, Arts and Literature
Priyadarshini, Anamika “Lihaaf, A Story of The Story”, Sage Publication
Mitra Indira, "There Is No Sin in Our Love": Homoerotic Desire in The Stories of Two Muslim Women Writers, University of Tulsa
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley, Penguin, 1984.
Eagleton, Mary, editor. A Concise Companion to Feminist Theory. Oxford, 2003.
Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case of Feminist Revolution. Bantam, 1970.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction. Vintage; Reissue edition, 1990.
Handler, Lisa. “In the Fraternal Sisterhood: Sororities as Gender Strategy.”
Gender and Society, vol. 9, no. 2, April 1995, pp. 236-255.
Hossain, Rokeya Shekhawat. “Sultana’s Dream” (1905).
The Essential Rokeya: Selected Works of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. Brill, 2013, pp. 159-168.
Hutt, Michael, James. “The Short Story in Nepali.” Himalayan Voices,
Jain, Jasbir. Indigenous Roots of Feminism: Culture, Subjectivity and Agency.Sage,2011.
Jussawalla, Feroza. “To Veil or Not to Veil: Muslim Women Writers Speak theirRights.”
Leonard, Debali. “Futuristic Technologies and Purdah in the Feminist Utopia: Rokeya S. Hossain’s ‘Sultana’s dream.” Feminist Review, no. 116, 2017, pp.144-153.
