Maverick Palette: Unveiling the Doxic Conflation in Ismat Chughtai’s Plays Fasaadi (1938)(Troublemaker) and Intekhaab(1939 )(Selection)

“Ours was a remarkable family, uninhibited and aware, free from falsehood and cant…Whatever I felt, I expressed openly…one should learn to express oneself openly on the basis of one’s experience and observation, instead of towing the treaded line out of fear of defying the traditional norms. The culture of landed gentry had made the woman suppress their desires ,feelings and ideas.I have depicted these very women and their psychological contradictions.”Ismat Chughtai.(Negi, 48).

Everything that Chughtai wrote has the closet possible connection, with what she has lived through,

even though it may not have been her actual experience. Every play she has written has served for

her, as a function of acting as a means of finding spiritual release and purification, not just of herself

but of society too. And yet, may of the crucial experiences that helped to mould her consciousness

and give shape and body to her plays remain poorly documented. This is particularly true of her

plays.But we know tantalisingly very little about them.

Chughtai was aware the role drama and theatre can play in societies.Its oral and performative facets facilitate contact with the larger non-literate proletariat communities/population in India, and provide glimpses of resistant cultural practices at local level. Ostensibly, she was astute enough to understand, with the active presence of Indian People’s Theatre’s Association (IPTA) that drama and theatre as a terrain, that have exhibited its potentiality to inquire and challenge “authoritarian structures through the use of forms that have been creatively altered.”(Bhatia xxvii).
Chughtai, understood the implication of the mundane, the ordinary practices of a woman’s quotidian life, the domestic rituals of her home and the affection of her family relationships.