I think I didn’t articulate the most important implication of my discussion of Ismat Chughtai’s “The Eternal Vine” (Amar Bel) last week: her writing does not land as feminist for me. Amrita Pritam managed to show the quiet horror of domestic gendered subjugation and give the women she writes deep agency in their lives. On the other hand, Chughtai (at least in the selection we read) doesn’t seem to be as systematically critically feminist. Her project doesn’t seem to imagine modes of women’s agency while portraying the nature of patriarchy. “Prostitution/Profession” (Tawa’if) is certainly progressive in the way it demonstrates the constructed nature of the position of tawaifs in society. Chughtai constructs a female first-person narrator who critically engages with social norms, but also is emotionally embedded in them. She contends with them; she struggles with them. But in conversation with her other stories, portrayal of women’s subjectivities doesn’t seem to be something she is committed to in principle. She obfuscates Rokhsanah’s in Amar Bel: any hint of her agency is always presented as being at the expense of her husband, Shujaat.
“A Pair of Hands” (Do Haath) is similarly questionable when it comes to her portrayal of gender. The story portrays a woman named Gori, whose husband, Ram Autar, has gone off to war. In this time, just because of the way she exists in her body, she ignites a controversy in the community. They hold meeting that addresses the problem of her “swaying hips” and create a “committee for the preservation of husbands” (165). Ismat Chughtai goes on to legitimize this absurdity by having Gori have an affair with Ram Rati, her brother-in-law. All the while, she doesn’t refer to Gori by name, but instead by her familial relation — daughter-in-law — denying her individuality and relegating her to the domestic sphere. When her husband returns from war after three years, she has just had Ram Rati’s son. The community is incensed and tries to convince Ram Autar to “Calculate, you fool!” (174). They carry anger at a personal level and yearn for its release in the form of justice from Ram Autar. But Ram Autar doesn’t care:
“He will contribute his two hands, sir, and he will be my support in my old age” Ram Autar lowered his head with these words.
And who knows why, Abba’s head, like Ram Autar’s, was also lowered, as if thousands of hands were bearing down on it… these hands were neither legitimate nor illegitimate; they were only hands, living hands that wash away the filth from the face of this planet, that carry the weight of its aging.
These tiny hands, dark and soiled, are illuminating the earth’s countenance. (175)
Ram Autar, because of his poverty, must hang his head in shame, and the source of that shame is his cheating wife. Chughtai chooses to reproduce a patriarchal narrative in this story: that women just existing in their bodies is sexual; that women’s sexuality is obscene. The story’s gender trouble permeates the rest of Chughtai’s commentary. The reason that Ram Autar’s poverty is so objectionable is because it results in his emasculation: Ram Autar has to accept care from a son that is not really his because he has no choice. Her critique ends up being inextricable from a validation of male reproductive desire. On top of this, she highlights men’s labor while obfuscating women’s: Gori’s son is the one who is reduced to just his two hands; he is fated to amount to the value of the labor he can do and the care he can provide. He washes away the filth from the face of this planet, he carries the weight of its aging. But what about Gori’s two hands? The two hands that will raise him? The two hands that will likely give Ram Autar care in his old age because she, as a woman, is the one expected to serve? Ismat Chughtai never mentions them. She only mentions her swaying hips.