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- Title
Domesticity in IsmatChughtai’s Fourth Day Outfit.
- Authors
Raheen, Afsara
- Abstract
The paper offers some instances of feminist reading in Ismat Chughtai, one of the Urdu writers of colonial and post-colonial period in India, through an analysis of the work Fourth Day Outfit, which takes essentially the centre stage in this paper. The author explored critically the pressures, suppressions and violence against women by the so-called high-minded men. She in most of her writings criticizes domestic violence and superstitions which usually run against women. She has thus been able to reach a large audience of women and articulated extraordinarily feminist politics in India. Readers, rather, positively, understanding her powerful narratives by reevaluating the parameters of contemporary feminist historiography and discourses, considered it as taboo, obscene or something against to a religion, in fact, to the Indian constitution and to the civil society. But to argue, the barbarous inhumanity of the civil society is the preliminarily reason which made her to expose its bitter reality, and to remove its satanic mask. However, the detailed analysis of the larger context of women violation in the selected work occupies and sheds light on how Chughtai, as feminist, has used her story to revise subtly the complex relationships between women and men, and for some extent, the marriage and violence in the society. We would like to analyze the theme of domesticity and superstitious activity in Chouthi Ka Jora/Fourth Day Outfit, which deals with the superstitions followed by the family, ( which neither truly found mentions in the religious books nor in the constitutions’ of any country) and domestic violence against woman merely for the sake of a man/husband. The paper also brings the question of identity and justice in the twenty first century for women. The investigation somewhat reaches to today’s status of women and the status at the time of Chughtai. Ismat in almost all of her writings raises a question of more equality and liberty for women compare to men. in her short story Bombay to Bhopal, She asks for more rights and freedom than men who; according to her, are also suffer from less equality, liberty and rights. She says they are incapable, unequal, less courageous, and of less wisdom compare to women either it might at home or outside of it. The paper highlights the critique of marriage; the pressures that build around a mothers’ mind, especially when she is a widow; where people considered her helpless, and she have to act according to the will of the society. It also criticizes the big problematic custom of India, where the elder daughter/sister should marry first in order for the next one to get married. The paper exposes that the marriage is not a choice but the goal of a woman’s life; where women's worth lies on her beauty and youth not on herself. The paper satirizes that women’s desires are rejected by their own family in such a way that marriage becomes need not longing; women desires not for the partner but for marriage, and in this way women are made to believe that, their marital status would solve all their problems and gives them a happy life which they have not dreamt of. And if they delayed in marriage, they would get hopeless, helpless, and becomes an object for the society to play with. The paper questions what if marriage fails? Do her identity gets vanish in the society? Can she not live a happy life after it? who is responsible for creating terror of believes around her? Ofcourse it is patriarchal society who doesn’t allow women to live happily neither before marriage nor after it. hence it’s the responsibility of women to create libre space for victimed women, rather humiliating, decieting her in the society. Disunity of women would destroy their upcoming rights and reservations so women need to maintain harmony among them to deconstruct the harmful constructed structure for women by the patriarchial society. To conclude the research paper explores Chughtai’s Fourth Day Outfit, where the exploitation of women happens at the hands of the men in their own family and in fact it is the duty of women to hide the crime and the criminal just because she is born as woman, and to keep the family honor by surrendering her honor, because patriarchy runs simultaneously in the society, in such a way that it will not even allowed women, for a single moment, to think of herself, her autonomy.
- Subjects
FOURTH Day Outfit (Book); CUGHTAI, Ismat, 1915-1991; VIOLENCE against women in literature; DOMESTIC violence; SOCIAL conditions of women; FEMINIST historiography
- Publication
Language in India, 2018, Vol 18, Issue 12, p10
- ISSN
1930-2940
- Publication type
Literary Criticism