Chughtai was against orthodoxy, therefore her plays explore various themes such as: feminine sexuality, middle-class gentility, gender discrimination. In my paper, I argue how Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of doxa is conflated in her plays Fasaadi (Troublemaker) and Intekhaaab (Selection). My paper is divided into two parts-in the first half I briefly discuss doxa and the second half of the paper is the praxis-how Chughtai conflates this notion in the aforementioned plays.

Pierre Bourdieu in his Outline of a Theory of Practice, used the term doxa to denote what is taken for granted in any particular society. The doxa, in his view, is the experience by which “the natural and social world appears as self-evident”. It encompasses what falls within the limits of the thinkable and the sayable (“the universe of possible discourse”), that which “goes without saying because it comes without saying”.(Grenfell, 120).The humanist instances of Bourdieu’s application of notion of doxa are to be traced in Distinction where doxa sets limits on social mobility within the social space through limits imposed on the characteristic consumption of each social individual: certain cultural artifacts are recognized by doxa as being inappropriate to actual social position, hence doxa helps to petrify social limits, the “sense of one’s place”, and one’s sense of belonging, which is closely connected with the idea that “this is not for us” (ce n´est pas pour nous). Thus individuals become voluntary subjects of those incorporated mental structures that deprive them of more deliberate consumption. Doxa and opinion denote, respectively, a society’s taken-for-granted, unquestioned truths, and the sphere of that which may be openly contested and discussed. Bourdieu explains the term “doxa” in his interview with theorist Terry Eagleton. Bourdieu believes that doxa derived from socialization, because socialization also deals with beliefs deriving from society,