Battle against the Veil in Ismat Chughtai’s Short Stories

Abstract: Ismat Chughtai is Urdu’s most courageous and controversial woman writer in the twentieth century. Her work not only reflects the complexion of Urdu fiction, but also is considered to be instrumental in bringing about an attitudinal change in the assessment of literary works. She makes women’s ’ struggle for freedom and self expression dominant concern of her long and short fiction. Ismat Chughtai wrote Short Stories, novels and political essays. She explores human relationships, their joys and sorrows, their loves and hates against the background of the larger social world and its changing environment. The present paper proposes to explore in Ismat Chughtai’s Short Stories from two volumes namely A Chughtai Collection and Lifting the Veil the theme of women’s social and sexual oppression in the name of religion and middle class morality. Women of all ages from a crawling baby, little children, adolescent girls, young women, mature mothers to grandmothers and cronies figure in her novels, novellas and Short Stories. She found customs and religions also are heavily loaded against women. She wrote about such subjects to show the misery caused by religious and sexual oppression to individuals and also to show the possibility of happiness for both men and women in equal relationships characterized by respect for mutual freedom. Same sex attractions in closed societies are also in her opinion the result of Purdah. Most important of the social evils are caused by unusual social and sexual repression of women in India. I