With her desire to bring to the public eye the hidden desires and reality of a hypocrite society, she wrote her (lesser known) stories, ‘Do Haath’ and ‘Gharwali’.ĭo Haath (‘A Pair Of Hands’) deals with the life of an Indian housewife, Goribi who is married to Ram Avtar. These themes were enough to make people uncomfortable.
She openly wrote about topics that were shushed during that time. From Fasadi (the first play she wrote) to the Lihaaf controversy, the list of stories is long. With Angaare as a role model, Ismat wrote various stories exploring the female sexuality without a hint of shame. The story, Parde Ke Peeche showcases what happens behind the curtains, by lifting them for a while. It brings to light the social issues of second marriages, marital rape and child marriage. Through this story, Begum showcases the plight of Muslim women who are forced to become slaves to their husband’s desires in the name of marriage, hence having unwanted children and ultimately losing their health and free will.
He goes the rounds to other women (sex workers) too.” Begum, through conversation with another woman tells us that she has to regularly get herself ‘tightened’ so he’d have the same pleasure as from a new wife, but now her husband wants to remarry a young girl because he’s no more ‘satisfied’ with her.
“Doesn’t matter if it is night or day, he wants his wife. She is 32 now but looks double her age due to bearing her husband’s voracious ‘needs’ from his wife, wherein he rapes her repeatedly. The story revolves around a woman, namely Mohommadi Begum, who has been giving birth to children since she got married at 18. While the book in an entirety was received as a shock by the society for its open treatment of sexuality, Jahan’s stories were received even more badly, since she was the only woman author amongst four other male writers.Īlso Read: Rashid Jahan: The Bad Girl Of Urdu Literature Published in 1931, Parde Ke Peeche (Behind the Veil) was one of the two short stories contributed in, ‘ Angaare’ (Embers), a controversial collection of short stories by authors Sajjad Zaheer, Sahibzada Mahmuduzaffar, Ahmed Aliand Rashid Jahan. Starting from Rashid Jahan, to Qurratul Ain Hyder, all these authors have played a huge part in the development of Urdu short story the way it is today. The list explores stories that depict the plight of women within the institution of marriage in different forms. Here are five groundbreaking, unconventional and ‘bebaak’ (bold) stories, as they would call it – that are responsible for this shift in our books and our minds as well. This progression, we owe to the few authors who suffered a great deal of ostracization, fatwas, social angst and isolation in order to bring this to happen. Urdu literature has seen a drastic shift in its story-writing in the course of the last one century.