Renowned for her candidness, indomitable spirit, keen discernment, and an awesome capacity to call a spade a spade, Ismat Chughtai is perhaps one of the best-known twentieth century feminist Urdu writers. She draws the attention of readers and critics alike, and is perhaps, among the most translated also. In spite of a large amount of material available on, or about her,

this volume comprising her letters and interviews will very likely attract a good deal of attention. After all, what can be more reliable or interesting than reading the writer articulate herself, on the personal, political and literary, albeit in translation?
Universally, across cultures, letters form an integral constituent of literary, ideological and/or biographical material, and in a world where the personal and the political are inextricably interlinked, their availability may provide insights into, or open windows on significant aspects of the lives, times and politics of public figures—politicians, writers, poets, philosophers and many more. Within families too, at strictly personal levels, the availability of well-preserved letters of older, or deceased relatives may transport young readers into a world of yore. And though this may be hard to find, nothing can be more illumining or engaging than the availability of an exchange of correspondence between two or more people. Letters may be personal or familiar, and informal; political, ideological, educational, and formal. They may even combine the formal and informal. At times they may be written with a view to publication, either immediately or at a later date. Or they may not be written for publication. Accordingly, it follows that letters may be meant for single, or larger, public readership. Regardless of their target readership, letters shed invaluable light on writers and their opinions, on their relationships with family, friends and fellow-writers and may, in cases where writers keep up a steady correspondence, even help trace their literary evolution. Several collections of letters of well-known literary and political personages are available in Urdu. Qurratulain Hyder weaves letters ingeniously into the narrative of her biographical Kar-eJahan Daraz Hai and perhaps the most well-known are the poet Mirza Ghalib’s letters, translated into English, contextualized and annotated in detail. This volume comprising Chughtai’s letters and interviews, translated by Tahira Naqvi, is perhaps the earliest such, by a woman writer. Naqvi’s translation is seamless. She glosses her text to elucidate the culture specifics she retains, and annotates it to provide background or perspective, to people, incidents and/or facts. Her introduction elaborating on the two genres translated in this text is brief but informative. To conclude it, Naqvi cites a brief incident that dialogically demonstrates Chughtai’s free-spiritedness and her encouragement to young women to be the same, even if it entails erring or floundering. This helps set the tone for the text.
In several letters Chughtai consciously voices her enthusiasm with regard to writing letters or their replies—acts that at times, extend over several days. Many included in this volume are personal; some verge on the intimate. Those addressed to relatives elucidate Chughtai’s deep love for and her concern and anguish over the misfortunes or demises of her siblings, cousins, nephews and nieces; she expresses her love for, and pride in their, her daughters’ and grandchild’s achievements; she advises, admonishes, argues and shares her joys, sorrows, anger, loneliness and excitement—the crests and troughs of day-to-day existence. In these letters, she is unequivocally a family woman, and wouldn’t have meant them for public readership. But for her relatives’ sharing them with Naqvi, these letters could not have appeared here. Chughtai’s letters to editors, publishers and literary friends or contemporaries are nuanced and elucidate her views on the prevailing literary and publishing culture. Naqvi has translated several unsent letters as well. In one particularly interesting one, Chughtai sternly ticks off Saira Bano and instructs her to show some womanly grit. This is typical of Chughtai, for she is known to endorse and assert the primacy of selfhood. Two letters are vital from the point of view of her political or ideological disposition—one wherein she affirms she never cared for the Progressive creed, and another wherein she is miserable over having to spend a few days in a remote and backward village. I found her letters to her grandson revealing a lonely, ageing woman, adrift on the tide of affairs.
Interviews or conversations have always afforded first-hand information on public personages and have, consequently, always had readers and/or listeners and critics on the lookout for these. The interviews included here have been published over a span of about twenty years or so, the earliest having been recorded in the seventies. In these, we come face to face with a spirited Ismat Chughtai who responds to a plethora of questions put to her by critics and academics from India and Pakistan. At the personal level, she talks about her disposition and her experiences, about her family, money, society, religion and secularism. In regard to her literary self, she apprises about her evolution as a writer; articulates about her fiction, language and art of writing; progressive and feminist politics and literature; contemporary writers and the state of modern Urdu fiction; the new literary aesthetic; the nature and scope of Hindi cinema and her filmic experiences. We can judge that her relationships with the progressives and filmwalas stem from ideological solidarity, mutual respect for one another’s art, and also, a carefree camaraderie, possible only among kindred spirits. While these are genial and convivial, her opinions regarding culturally and ideologically dissimilar writers can be caustic. While Chughtai clarifies and/or elucidates her positions, and explains herself and/or her standpoints, she is never at pains to effusively justify herself or project what maybe a socio-culturally or politically acceptable view or image. On the contrary, she seems quite comfortable courting controversy, refuting herself, or laughing off serious matters and at times, provoking deeper probing.
Available in English translation is much of Chughtai’s fiction portraying marginalized women and family life, mostly in Muslim north India and life in Bombay and its film world, as well as her non-fiction, depicting her life and times, contemporaries, friends and family. Tahira Naqvi has translated much of this. However, this is the first time Ismat Chughtai’s letters and interviews have been published in English translation. In all of these, unmistakably, she articulates herself with spirited candour. We find as readers that, taken together, these letters and interviews enable us in many ways to add more dimensions to the Ismat Chughtai we are already familiar with, who was, and still is, an inspiration to many. We can see and understand that taking up the pen for a cause, or even courting controversy were second nature to her. All the same, her responses are, at times, dissident, facile or evasive and at times she surprises or even perplexes us. This volume is an engaging self-exposition of one of Urdu literature’s most well-known writers whose articulations transport a reader into the yester-years of Urdu fiction and Hindi-Urdu cinema—years during which progressive ideology overarched literature, cinema and drama and progressive writers, actors and directors effortlessly negotiated these art-forms.

Fatima Rizvi is Professor, Department of English and Modern European Languages, University of Lucknow, Lucknow.