A Letter to God

Mirza Azeem Baig Chughtai (1895-1941), Ismat Chughtai’s elder brother who had great influence on her career and whom she remembers very fondly in her essay ‘Dozakhi’ for his fight against injustice and hate, has written many novels of note that include Shareer Biwi, Maharani Ka Khwab, Khanum, Shehzori and Vampire. A lawyer by training and profession and an unorthodox thinker and a feminist in his beliefs, Chughtai ruffled many feathers by his words and acts in his short life. In his brief Preface to Vampire, dated 24 November 1932, he expresses his disappointment with vulgar pornographic titles of some cheap novels and magazines containing ‘completely imaginary, unrealistic, incorrect, improbable, unnatural, trashy, titillating, suggestive, vulgar and romantic dialogue that makes one’s head spin’ which were being dished out to Urdu readers of his time. Pulling out an English word ‘vampire’ for his title rather than any Persian or Arabic word, Chughtai’s light-hearted apologia for his unorthodox use also suggests that he was open to borrowings from English, a linguistic process which is now much more established than it was in his time. Vampire’s English translator Zoovia Hamiduddin, Azeem Baig Chughtai’s granddaughter, who has also written a comprehensive Translator’s Note and Translator’s Afterword, talks about Chughtai’s familiarity with English Gothic novels and sees their resonance in Vampire. However, unlike Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), she writes, Chughtai’s ‘vampire is not an outsider, but one of our own…given birth, and is being nurtured by conservative Muslim society itself.’