While doxa is used as a tool for the formation of argument, it should be noted that it is also formed by argument. The former can be understood as told by James A. Herrick in The History and Theory of Rhetoric: An Introduction: “The Sophists in Gorgias hold that rhetoric creates truth that is useful for the moment out of doxa, or the opinions of the people, through the process of argument and counterargument. Socrates will have no part of this sort of ‘truth’ which, nevertheless, is essential to a democracy.” Due to compromised opinions within a society, as well as opinions not counted for due to inaccessibility and apathy, doxa is not homogeneous, nor is it created agreeably. Rather, it is pliable and Ismat’s basic argument in the plays, Fasaadi and Intekhaab is that she has a strong investment in critiquing a traditional feudal social order but articulating, as well, the transgressive power of sexual desire, linguistic excess, and bourgeois individualism as each fragment disrupts the containing structures of marriage, law, and social hierarchy. Ismat’s strongest move is–however sketchily–to remind us of the historical specificity of dramatic writing: its emergence at the moment when a nascent capitalism and a residual feudalism coincided, producing plays deeply fissured by ideological contradictions: and she works hard to expose the ways in which society’s devices of closure and containment are insufficient to control the forces threatening all structures of stability. Perhaps inevitably, Chughtai is at her most iconoclastic when, in her plays, she scathingly reads powerful mystifications of a patriarchal social order in which inequalities of rank, gender, and property are represented as “natural” and in which the disruptive power of sexual desire is sidestepped by transposing wives into daughters and sentimentalising, without disturbing, patriarchal authority.