TRANSGRESSION AND RESISTANCE: A POSTCOLINAIL FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF ISMAT CHUGHTAI’S KAGHZI HAI PAIRAHAN

Abstract

This is a postcolonial feminist analysis of Ismat Chughtai’s work ‘Kaghzi Hai Pairahan’. Chughtai highlights the plight of third world women who are doubly colonized by both colonialism and patriarchy. This study analyses how women in the third world especially in the subcontinent are silenced, oppressed and marginalized through various orthodox sociocultural structures. Postcolonial feminism as a theoretical framework seeks to redress the misrepresentation of the third world women by the white western feminism. Western feminism misrepresents the third world women through their essentialist discourse ignoring their racial, cultural, social, and political specificities; and doing so, act as oppressors of their “sisters”. Ismat Chughtai in ‘Kaghzi Hai Pairahan’ narrates her own story of heroic struggle, resistance and success giving hope to women who find themselves shackled by the clutches of social and cultural taboos. She exposes the hypocrisy of the society by bringing to light the contradictions that mark the social set up and values. This research draws on insights from Spivak’s famous essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ and Mohanty’s Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses and shows that postcolonial feminism asserts the alterity, agency and difference of the third women as discrete and distinct categories that western feminism cannot account for.