Beauty as Violation: Female Desire, Disposition and Destiny in the Select Short Stories of Ismat Chughtai

Abstract

At a time when India was still not ready to accept sexuality as a natural phenomenon or women’s desire as a need, Ismat Chughtai wrote about these non-traditional themes without being overtly didactic in its undertones. She lays bare the true human nature in the most raw and unashamed manner through her narrations. The female desire, patriarchal control and marriage as a means of regulating how power is exercised form a large part of her oeuvre. This paper aims to show that female beauty and body become a site of surveillance, dominance, as well as a tool that threatens to destabilise the male ego. Drawing on her three short stories, ‘Eternal Vine’ (Amar Bel), ‘The Rock’ (Chatan) and ‘The Wife’ (Ghar Waali), which rely on the theatrics of marriage, it shows how women negotiate between the pain and pleasures of beauty, their own desire and presupposed disposition within the conjugal relationship.