Marginal Subjects, Bold Subversions: Revisiting the Modernist Aesthetics of Obscenity in Ismat Chughtai

Abstract

Modernism in Indian writings is believed to have had its beginning in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

Modern Indian literature has to do much with the intricacy of India’s encounter with colonialism. Instead of considering modernity as something that was bequeathed by colonialism, modernity in the colonized needs to be understood as a complexly layered process that critiques their own social traditions as well as the newly invented ones. The paper endeavours to understand the ways in which ideas of colonial modernity collide with the reformist impulse in pre-independence Indian society

through a reading of two of Chughtai’s texts: the short story “Lihaaf” that earned her much notoriety and a legal charge of obscenity, and the essay “In the name of those married women” based on the same episode that describes the courtroom drama in great detail. Chughtai’s essay and her short story when read together highlights the cultural effects British civilizing mission had on Indian life and society with its spillover on the arena of art, culture and literature by introducing new conceptions

and forms of the obscene in Indian society. Chughtai’s writing is important because it shows the interlinking of these new categories of gender, ideas of obscenity and the rise of a new middle class morality and the role literature played in critiquing emergent forms of colonial modernity.