LANGUAGE IN INDIA

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Volume 25:9 September 2025
ISSN 1930-2940

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Unveiling the Domestic: Gender, Desire, Sexuality, and Female Identity in Ismat Chughtai's The Quilt: Stories

Suresh Kumar

Abstract

Ismat Chughtai's short stories, collected in The Quilt: Stories, mark a radical intervention in Urdu literature through their candid portrayal of women's lives, emotions, and desires. This paper examines selected stories: The Quilt, The Mole, The Homemaker, Touch-Me-Not, All Alone, Mother-in-Law, Roots, and The Invalid?to uncover how Chughtai situates the domestic sphere as both a site of confinement and a space of subtle resistance. Her narratives foreground women negotiating gender roles, repressed sexual desires, loneliness, and intergenerational conflicts within the household. At the same time, she exposes the complexities of class divisions and female relationships, revealing women not merely as victims but as individuals with agency, contradictions, and voice. By engaging with themes of gender, desire, sexuality, and identity, this study argues that Chughtai's stories destabilize conventional notions of morality and womanhood, offering a subversive reimagining of female subjectivity in twentieth-century South Asian society.

Keywords:Ismat Chughtai, The Quilt: Stories, domesticity, gender, desire, sexuality, female identity; feminism, Urdu literature.

Introduction

Ismat Chughtai (1915-1991) is celebrated as one of the most uncompromising voices in twentieth-century Urdu literature. A bold stylist, a pioneering feminist, and a sharp social critic, Chughtai wrote against the grain of a conservative, patriarchal society that sought to restrict the roles of women to silence, obedience, and invisibility. Her fiction, often set within the seemingly ordinary domestic spaces of kitchens, bedrooms, courtyards, and verandas, reveals the complex realities of women's lives?realities marked by longing, repression, negotiation, and subtle acts of resistance. (Sood, 37)

Her most famous story, Lihaaf (The Quilt), published in 1942, provoked widespread controversy and even obscenity charges in colonial India because of its daring portrayal of female desire outside the boundaries of heteronormativity. Yet The Quilt was not an isolated provocation but part of a larger project in Chughtai's fiction: the exploration of gender, sexuality, desire, and identity within the everyday lives of women. (Sood 38)

This paper examines selected short stories from The Quilt and Other Stories?including The Quilt, The Mole, The Homemaker, Touch-Me-Not, All Alone, Mother-in-Law, Roots, and The Invalid. Read together, these works reveal the "domestic" not as a private, apolitical space, but as a contested terrain where women confront restrictions and negotiate their own selfhood. Through irony, humour, realism, and daring candour, Chughtai articulates female voices that had long been silenced, offering alternative ways of imagining identity and agency.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Suresh Kumar
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Govt. College Indora, 176401
Kangra, Himachal Pradesh, India
vijaysuresh8890@gmail.com
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