Behind the Stage and in the Wings!
Sukrita Paul Kumar
A VERY STRANGE MAN (AJEEB AADMI): A NOVEL by Ismat Chughtai Women Unlimited, 2008, 231 pp., 250
February 2008, volume 32, No 2

‘My years in the film industry were heady ones’. So said Ismat Chughtai. Having married Shahid Lateef from the film world in 1942, she gradually got inducted into the film domain herself and wrote scripts for several well-known Bombay films. Indeed, her intimate knowledge of this world was bound to get into her fiction. As is known, there is not much distinction between the actual life experience of Ismat and the fiction she created. Her novel A Very Strange Man, recently translated and published in English, is no exception then.

In his Preface to Ismat Chughtai’s collection of short stories, Chotein, the well-known Urdu writer Krishan Chander wrote, ‘In disguising courage, drowning their readers in astonishment and restlessness, and then all of a sudden, finally converting this restlessness into happiness, Ismat and Manto are very close to each other, and in this regard very few Urdu short story writers can compete with them’.

Such certification from a contemporary writer of eminence, in itself, calls for attention. However, what is noteworthy is the general readers’ consistently enthusiastic responses to Ismat Chughtai’s short stories and novels. In fact, as time passes, Ismat’s writings seem to have greater appeal, as much for readers as for scholars of literature.

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