When it comes to Ismat Chughtai, there's no way to memorialise the immortal

If the premise of death, and certainly of its politics, is to inaugurate finality, to establish in all essentials the grandiose end of thought, then death has eluded Ismat Chughtai.

For the force of her writing, although decades since have squandered, is still to be located in the interstices of the personal and the political, and in all those realms where the two are inseparable. Of what significance, then, is the performance of remembrance; indeed, how are we to remember Ismat Chughtai? Is there a way to memorialise the immortal?

Born to a "liberal" Muslim family of comfortable affluence, Chughtai was a child of modernity, or to borrow from Minault, a "daughter" of reform.

As a discursive subject of the aforesaid reformation, born out of colonialism and the historical encounter with modernity, she began, in appreciable earnestness, to read its chimera of emancipation. Faced with the prospect of wasting away the promising years of her life in Sambhar, where her father was transferred as a judicial magistrate, young Ismat expressed her desire to study in Aligarh, going as far as to threaten her family with the prospect of running away, or even converting to Christianity.

"I was outspoken, " she explains, "and ill-mannered - purdah had already been imposed on me, but my tongue was an unsheathed sword. No one could restrain it."

So was, as the literary circles were to subsequently discover, her vociferous pen. In writings as "Gainda", her semi-autobiographical novel Tedhi Lakeer (The Crooked Line), and in her controversial text, Lihaaf, Chughtai configures and reconfigures the life of literature, womanhood, modernity, and even of its anchoring nation-state.

Emphasising the helplessness of her pen, she saw herself as only little beyond an "ordinary camera", deployed primarily for the purpose of recording reality as it is. She was among the first, and certainly the most eloquent, to normalise the repressed expression of female sexuality, of rendering intelligible a personhood that the world was insistent on denying. For this act of courage, she was accused of, even booked, for "obscenity", but when the judge - hearing the case of her work and that of Saadat Hasan Manto's - remarked that the latter's was "littered with filth", Chughtai feebly, albeit stupendously, reminded him: "The world is also littered with filth." Such was Chughtai's ability to see violence in the seamlessly embossed, to deconstruct in the tropics of the usual - all that was relegated to the shadows of acceptability.

In her Gainda, one finds her speaking of the sexual economy of caste, so bringing to accordion life the experiential world of the widow Gainda - not one of grief, mourning, and death, but a personhood of desires, the ability to ask for and of love, and the unflinching will to live.

"Lihaaf" is a revelation mediated by the narrativity of the quilt - a simultaneously operating symbol of horrific oppression, as also of fulfilment, capturing the dark sphere of desire beyond the normatively inscribed, with its magnificently potent undertones of lesbianism and sexual politics. In that vein, The Homemaker emerges as a poignant tale of the classed dimensions of "sluttishness", negotiating, but effectively critiquing, the marginality of behaviour that is considered antithetical to the "good" woman. In writings as Kafir, Sacred Duty, and The Survivor, Chughtai imaginatively lampoons the frivolousness of politics, especially that of religious divide - a lesson particularly significant for us to revisit today, tomorrow, and in the years beyond.

Yet, to neglect the contextual milieu of Chughtai's textuality would be to read her insufficiently. In "reading" reality, accomplished as it is through her modality of being as an ordinary camera, she is also reading modernity; so far as Chughtai, in her situational position of the reform reads modernity, she is effortlessly participating in its experience, even its construction.

As many have argued in words better than mine, it is Chughtai's constant endeavour to reshape the very experience of her discursive life - to breathe orderliness into the crooked line that modernity professes to straighten. The modern encounter is necessarily encoded into the cultural specificity of tradition, and it is this tradition that defines and borders the approximal range of modernity's reach. This spirit of transition, this constancy of inhabiting a world in flux is the cultural encounter that Chughtai profoundly, almost ceaselessly echoes.

To answer the questions I attempted to raise on death, afterlife, and the politics of remembrance is to bring to life a motley of texts and textuality that is far from the vagaries of death. In the process of history, as is inevitably its fatal flaw, many have come to read Ismat Chughtai as contained in her time - a mere recorder of revolutionary circumstance, but never a political source of its articulation. This signifies the immediacy of recovering her profoundly political voice. But "recovery" is an act of history, and history is in the business of death.

After all, one can make Chughtai speak only when she has stopped speaking. Instructing the aforementioned judge in the politics of Manto's filth, she elucidated, "The world is also littered with filth. If it is raked up, it becomes visible, and people feel the need to clean it up."

Encountering, after many years of its writing, the protagonist of "Lihaaf", Chughtai froze. But the begum was surprisingly prompt in noticing Ismat's presence, reaching to tell her that she had, finally, freed herself from her abusive marriage, remarried, and birthed a beautiful son. Ismat softened, and realised only in tears: "I felt fully rewarded when I saw her flower-like boy. I felt he was mine as well - a part of my mind, a living product of my brain. An offspring of my pen. And I realised at that moment that flowers can be made to bloom in rocks. The only condition is that one has to water the plant with one's heart's blood."

We are, despite popular claims, far from a post-feminist world, so maybe Ismat Chughtai did not change the world. But as long as there is the comfort of seeing our political gesture reflected in a text that has never stopped speaking, perhaps we know how to.