Taslima’s Lies, Ismat’s Truth

Very interesting read, although what Nasrin`s failure is and what Chugtai`s virtues are arent not explicated. I also am not sure what the comparison of two seemingly different women writers is based on-if its their personal lives, I tend to have ambivalent reactions:

1. binaries are particularly unhelpful in understanding identity
2. setting up one party as good and the other as bad tends to simplify the discussion-hopefully we`re aiming for complicated narratives
3. Setting up two women seems to be as ethical as a cock or dog fight. A spectacle yes, but a bloodthirsty hobby...

Also, it would be informative to know what exactly was happening in Bangladeshi politics during Nasrin`s ascendancy; was this the time where Bangladeshi educational authorities had decided to ban the use of English in universities, implementing Bangla only dictates?

correction:
aren`t explicated clearly enough

the author`s ``...in that little dump of hers.``

Madam, that little dump produced the man who wrote the national anthems of your land and mine and in the process won the Nobel Prize. As Daniel Webster said so famously in the Dartmouth College case, ``She may be a small college, my lords, but there are those who love her.`` I don`t think I ever recall a Chowk author so openly deriding a country. It certainly adds color to the argument but detracts from its sense of objectivity.

this is friday.. i checked with my buddies of the book.. this is one really long article with no point except b!tchging @... envy....taslima.. please delete it ...it is shameless

i really did not want to respond just in case i am the only pathetic one...what the helll...

let us pu things in perspective... tslima is experimenting with stuff waaay beyond south asia.... so pls deal with it or else say something intelligent.

the biggest problem wiht s asia is that of lack of freedom to select one`s mate...( in terms of producing the next generaion) and this cuts across caste/religion/ethnic boundaries.

this issue is weakening the gene-pool can you realise that?

so any eamancipation is welcome!

please i beg you.. talk to the new generation ... pls .. take part in the great human struggl e to propagage our genes

let taslima experiment please... its not a bit deal.

:(

Bracketing ismat with Taslima is utter injustice......

Taslima is a commercial wannabe........Ismat was a writer...

I have only just accessed this, so a quick note for sigalph235:

``...in that little dump of hers`` was not meant to deride a country; it was said more in a rhetorical fashion, since Taslima assumes this is what Bangladesh is...if anything, I am questioning her attitude towards her country. There is no way I imagined this might add colour. And if you are offended, then let me assure you my intention was most certainly not to run down Bangladesh. I have always stood up for the smaller nations, being a part of the developing world myself.

I do hope you interact regarding the work of Taslima...it would be educative for all of us to get a perspective from there.

More later...

I have only just accessed this, so a quick note for sigalph235:

``...in that little dump of hers`` was not meant to deride a country; it was said more in a rhetorical fashion, since Taslima assumes this is what Bangladesh is...if anything, I am questioning her attitude towards her country. There is no way I imagined this might add colour. And if you are offended, then let me assure you my intention was most certainly not to run down Bangladesh. I have always stood up for the smaller nations, being a part of the developing world myself.

I do hope you interact regarding the work of Taslima...it would be educative for all of us to get a perspective from there.

More later...

CAn Taslima be considered as an ISLAMIC woman???

am an atheist. I do not believe in prayers, I believe in work. And my work is that of an author. My pen is my weapon.
-- Taslima Nasrin, interview with International Society for Islamic Secularization (ISIS), quoted from Bubbles Online

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#1 by Saminasha on November 21, 2003 4:48pm PT
Saminaha! I can hear you trying to speak out. Can it be a bit more louder and explicit please!!!
Comparison of narratives which have been DE-Contextualized is a well known strategy of criticism- I would like some more reaction on what Farzana is trying to do - Lampooning Taslima by using terms like ``TRULY``, ``CONTEMPORARY`` and ( on the top of it) ``ISLAMIC`` ( as far as I can understand Taslima is an Atheist)- BTW As she aged, Chugtai`s feminism under went various twists and turns from the youthful revolutionary Ismat to the mellowed, bombay socialite.

Anyway, this is what bombastic journalism is about- trivializing issues , stereo-typing persons, lampooning, and ofcourse-- plain and simple Bit*hing.

On Defining a TRULY contemporary Muslim woman

Balance gone awry

Ismat Chugtai`s aesthetic works in her fiction. In non-fiction, she comes across as contradictory and unthinking, says ASHLEY TELLIS.

THIS is a deeply disappointing book. There are several reasons for this. There is Tahira Naqvi who is an abominable translator (the book is rife with bad translations, clumsy formulations and wrong English), there is Alpana Khare`s unimaginative cover and there is Tahira Naqvi again, this time with a banal and insufferable introduction to this selection of Chughtai`s prose writings, trotting out all the usual cliches about Chughtai.

But the most disappointing thing about My Friend, My Enemy is Ismat Chughtai herself. She proves herself a rambling, anecdotal, frequently tiresome prose writer and certainly no literary critic (to her credit, she admits this); even her reminiscences and portraits lack any organising principles or emotive coherence. The ``Essays`` section begins with a round-up of all the writing on Partition which is seriously damaged by her pedestrian notion of Progressive realism. She listlessly catalogues novels and what they are about, faulting them for lack of verisimilitude. She forwards an essentialist and offensive notion of motherhood (that she surely should have examined) making unbelievable statements like ``she`s [the figure of Mother India] still a woman and a woman can never tolerate a mockery of the mother-child relationship nor deliberately attack it``. She offers a vulgarised reading of Manto, accusing him of shock tactics, even when she spent half her energies otherwise defending him, if badly, against that charge.

Then there is a confused and contradictory defence of the erotic in contemporary writing. On the one hand, Chugtai somewhat bafflingly says that people are poor in India and should read more erotic literature; that most of them are illiterate does not cross her mind. On the other, she reprimands people for seeing biology text books as ``titillation only (sic)`` and not illustrative of ``medical principles``. Again, she defends the erotic under all circumstances as being educative and liberatory, yet complains that when the really important bits are elsewhere in her writing, people only read the erotic sections.

``Heroine`` continues this unreconstructed rambling. It surveys the ways women are portrayed in writing, especially by men and examines types like the respectable housewife, the tawaif and the working woman. However, though the plea at the end of the piece is to recognise women as just women, the types are not examined enough, the defence of the tawaif ranges from the weak to the problematic (they need reform, she says) and compulsory heterosexuality remains unexamined throughout. The essentialism of being seen just as women (are females always women?) appears to be questioned in ``Aurat``, yet Chughtai retains the traditional notion that women have an intrinsic feminity they should employ only outside the work space - even as she criticises Russian women for defeminising themselves in the workplace.

The contradictions and lack of reflection in Chugtai`s hastily dashed musings can get exasperating. It is unimaginable that such a fine writer of fiction can be so unthinking in her non-fiction. This becomes glaringly apparent in her piece on the ``Lihaaf`` in the next section. It comes as a staggering shock that Chughtai did not stand by the radical sexual aesthetic of what is perhaps her finest story, that she was ashamed of it, regretted writing it, and went through the trial for it in such a lacklustre fashion. One can only share with Manto his wrath at her cowardice and lack of principles as a writer and defender of the erotic.

The last section is a set of portraits. The one on Manto shows that she cared for him less than she cared for judging him and leaves us with a deep sense of pain at his fate and her growing indifference to it. ``Chirag Roshan Hai``, her famous portrait of Krishen Chander is a moving account of the enigmatic writer, but content with the enigmatic resonance of anecdote, Chughtai does not build on her insights. There is a small and powerful vignette of filmstar singer Suraiya which is evocative of the film industry in its early days. Her portrait of Meeraji, however, is surprisingly misogynist and homophobic. Meeraji took on the name because of his love for one Meera Sen. Chughtai accuses her (Sen) of turning him to ``pulp`` and then wonders, ``How can any intelligent woman associate herself with such a weakling, who is proud to play the role of a wife?`` This, from a so-called feminist writer, leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.

Ismat Chughtai comes across as an individualist and a spirited writer who did not think deeply of art even as she drank deeply of life. Stick to her fiction. Her ingenuous aesthetic works there, representing the complex nature of the realities she sees with the right balance of verisimilitude and individual spirit. In non-fiction, this balance goes awry and the result is nothing short of embarrassing.

My Friend, My Enemy, Ismat Chugtai, translated by Tahira Naqvi, Kali for Women.
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2001/06/17/stories/1317017p.htm

Farzana,

Nice pungent piece!

But, Ismat aapa hardly deserves being mentioned in the same breath as Taslima. Lajja was unreadable...

But, I do feel that there is one thing you might have missed. Ismat Chugtai wrote at a time when her slightest act of independence seemed to rock first her family, then her immediate world, and then the Urdu speaking world. She too, in many ways, has benefitted from the fact that her persona and her life was inextricably linked with her works. If she was a man with the same amount of radicalism, she might not have had the same reputation. She became an icon as much for her radicalism as for her works.

In fact there are several men/women of substance and knowledge who say the first lady of Urdu is rightfully Quratulain Haider rather than Chugtai. This is not to take credit away from Chugtai for the defiant ``feminist`` she was.

Against that, Taslima`s is more of a storm in a tea cup. She is merely somebody who did things that seem big in her mind, and when publicly uttered, there is still a huge crowd willing to denounce her. From all accounts she is milking her fairly regular urban life, treating it with sentimentalism and a very timid and finally shallow amorality, and living off the reactiveness, and hence the controversy, of a staid society which still cannot hold back their over-the-top reactions.

In fact hers is not half a great social expose as as Tehmine Durrani??? who wrote ``My Feaudal Lord.``

But drama of real life, finally makes for good literary material only in the hands of somebody gifted. Otherwise, everybody has her/his story to tell. But, its the treatment that decides literary merit. I think you just gifted Taslima one more page on her vanity search on the google!

Harish

Ballukhan,

I dont see the purpose of championing one writer and downgrading another esp. in the contexts of female authorship on the subcontinent, rather than accepting that a range of works and writers can exist and contribute to a collective discourse. I also think that for many women writers, the act of writing can be fraught with risk and disapproval- do male writers have the same kinds of taboos and stigmas to face if they write anything that is not considered ``seemingly``?

I like some of Nasrin`s poems-but I see them as I would Claude McKay`s work; it serves a particularly rhetorical purpose. Whether we agree with her or not, her text will also be used as a historical document of a specific narrative at a point of time on the subcontinent.

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