Mar 25,04 Women's History month continues
1. A reading of Ismat Chugtai’s famous (banned) short story, Lihaf (The Quilt).
2. An interview with Sunaina Maira about her book "Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City"
1. A reading of Ismat Chugtai’s famous short story, Lihaf (The
Quilt), in the studio by Betty Josef, Nusrat Malik and Yaksha
Shah.
This famous short story by Ismat Chugtai was written in 1941 and
banned by the then State Government on charges of obscenity.
Ismat Chugtai challenged this decision and won her lawsuit. Ismat
Chugtai was active in the Progressive Writer’s Association in the
1930s, and grew to become one of the most outspoken and prominent
short story writers of South Asia.
2. An interview with Sunaina Maira about her book Desis in the
House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City, published
in 2002. In her book, history is captured from streets, basements
and bars of New York City and it's suburbs by second generation
Indian-Americans not only through their use of music and clothing
from the home world but through a complex negotiation with memory
and nostalgia – theirs as well as those of their parents.
Besides, there will be news, music and information about the
going ons around town.
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Born in Badayun, UP, in 1915, ISMAT CHUGHTAI grew up largely in
Jodhpur. Her brother Azeem Baig Chughtai was a major early
influence, and taught her English, history, the Quran and Hadith.
She avoided marriage at fifteen only by getting engaged to a
cousin whom she never intended to marry. Similarly, she had to
fight for her education before she was allowed to obtain a
bachelor's degree from Isabella Thoburn College in Lucknow. She
taught at a girls' school in Bareilly before going on to teacher
training at Aligarh Muslim University. She and her other 6 women
classmates had to sit behind a curtain at the back of the class.
"If we could get what we wanted by sitting in purdah we would sit
in purdah. We were interested in studying. If they had told us to
wear burqas, we would have agreed."
In this period she started writing in secret. She married Shahid
Latif, a filmmaker, in 1941, and had two daughters. In this year
she also wrote her story Lihaaf (The Quilt). Its lesbian theme
brought her both notoriety and fame. She was charged by the
British government with obscenity, but won the case because her
lawyer argued that the story could be understood only by those
who already had knowledge of lesbianism, and thus could not be a
corrupting influence. In 1943 she turned completely to a writing
career. Rasheed Jahan, a leading writer and political
revolutionary of the time, was her most significant influence.
She says that many of her heroines have been modeled on Rasheed
Jahan. Ismat Chughtai died in 1991.
SUNAINA MAIRA, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies.
Professor Maira has been Assistant Professor of Asian American
Studies in English and Anthropology and Co-Director of the Asian
and Asian American Studies Certificate at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst since 1999. Holder of an Ed.D. in Human
Development and Psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of
Education, she is the author of Desis in the House: Indian
American Youth Culture in New York City (2002). She co-edited an
anthology, Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America
(1997), which received an award from the Before Columbus
Foundation, and is currently co-editing Youthscapes: Popular
Culture, National Ideologies, Global Markets (forthcoming, UPenn
Press). Maira has published numerous academic articles in
addition to writing fiction and has made many presentations and
invited lectures. She is one of the founding organizers of Youth
Solidarity Summer, a program for young activists of South Asian
descent; Diasporadics, a festival of arts and activism in New
York; and the South Asian Committee on Human Rights (SACH), a
grassroots group that works on issues of post-9/11 civil and
immigrant rights in the Boston area.
