Title: Lihaaf (The Quilt, لحاف) Author: Ismat Chughtai Creation Date: December 1942 Location: Lahore (Adab-i-Latif magazine) Collection: Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To
Brief
Ismat Chughtai published Lihaaf in the December 1942 issue of Adab-i-Latif, a Lahore Urdu literary magazine. She was twenty-seven, barely five years into publishing fiction. Within weeks the story attracted obscenity complaints; in 1944 she and the editor received summonses to the Lahore High Court under Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code — the same statute then being used against Saadat Hasan Manto.
Born in Badayun in 1915, ninth of ten children in a civil-service family, Chughtai fought into formal education at Aligarh Muslim University in the 1930s and joined the Progressive Writers' Movement alongside Manto, Krishan Chander, and Premchand.
Lihaaf is a fifteen-page story narrated by a child who observes but cannot interpret the relationship between Begum Jaan and her masseuse Rabbu inside a Muslim zenana. The story names nothing. Its erotic charge is carried entirely by a quilt rising and falling in the dark. The prosecution could not identify a single obscene word, the case was dismissed, and the story permanently opened South Asian literature to women's interior lives.
The Prohibition
Three prohibitions stacked against Chughtai at once.
The first was class and gender. Muslim families in the 1920s United Provinces did not educate daughters beyond basic literacy. Relatives were hostile. Her admission to Aligarh Muslim University was contested socially and bureaucratically — she was among the first Muslim women to enter its programmes.
The second was subject matter. The zenana — the women's quarter where female relatives and servants lived apart from men — was not considered fit for literature. The intimacies formed between women confined together were unspeakable. To write about them was to betray communal confidence and invite charges of indecency and disloyalty. Muslim respectability politics required the zenana to appear, to the outside world, as a space of piety and virtue.
The third was the colonial obscenity apparatus. Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code left "obscene" undefined, its meaning in the hands of colonial judges. When the summons arrived in 1944, Chughtai was a young writer and new mother, with no assurance she would not lose everything she had fought for.
The Strategy
The craft was the first strategy. Chughtai built Lihaaf around a child narrator whose observations are precise but whose understanding is incomplete. There is no explicit sexual vocabulary. The erotic charge is carried by a quilt moving in the dark; interpretation is left entirely to the reader. The child narrator was also her legal defence — the prosecution could not find a single obscene word.
The personal refusal was the second strategy. Friends urged her to settle. She refused. Her husband Shahid Latif backed her at risk to his own film career. Manto, tried simultaneously for Bu, stood with her; photographs outside the Lahore court became an icon of South Asian literary modernism.
The third strategy was the career that followed. Chughtai did not retreat from the material that had nearly destroyed her. Terhi Lakeer appeared the following year; stories continued for four decades. She moved into the Bombay film industry, using screenplay income to sustain literary work when the Urdu market could not support her. She refused to be reduced to one story.
The Price and the Legacy
The price was reputational distortion. Lihaaf eclipsed everything Chughtai wrote after it — Terhi Lakeer, Masooma, the film work she considered more ambitious. Some male colleagues in the Progressive Writers' Movement distanced themselves; publishers grew cautious. She died in Bombay in October 1991, aged seventy-six, having asked to be cremated rather than buried — a final refusal of the communal categories she had spent her life contesting. She never received the institutional honours that came eventually to her male contemporaries.
The legacy is the opening of Urdu literature to female sexuality as a subject that could be written about without apology. Before Lihaaf such writing did not exist in sustained form; after it, writers including Qurratulain Hyder and Krishna Sobti could enter the space without fighting the same battle from scratch. Tahira Naqvi's English translations extended the story's reach. Scholars of queer South Asian literature and of women's writing have both claimed it as foundational — and the impossibility of settling that argument is part of what has kept it alive.
The Reading
The Quilt in the Dark
Even now, when I see a quilt on a winter night, the whole scene comes back to me. Something about a quilt in the dark has never stopped being frightening, and I am a grown woman now, and I ought to have got over it. But I have not. I will tell you what happened and leave the explanation to you. I was nine years old, or thereabouts, and my mother had sent me for some weeks to stay with a distant relative, the Begum Jan, whose household was large and whose husband, the nawab, was rich and whose reputation for respectability was such that my mother considered the arrangement a kindness.
The Begum
The begum was the young wife of a wealthy nawab — the minor aristocracy of our world, the world of late-colonial Muslim India. The nawab had married her for status and for the appearance of a household in order. His own interests, one understood later, ran in other directions — there were always young male students around him, boys he kept and supported and brought into the house through the side entrance. He had no use for his wife beyond the public role she performed at the few social occasions his family's name required. He had installed her in an elegant house, given her fine clothes and jewels and a full complement of servants, and then effectively ceased to think about her. The begum was therefore a young, healthy woman locked in a marriage from which she would receive neither physical nor emotional contact, living in a household whose other occupants were servants and whose routines the nawab did not trouble to observe.
The Household
The household I entered was the zenana I had grown up adjacent to — I knew its textures from inside. The arrangement of the rooms, the hierarchy of the servants, the timing of meals, the way purdah structured the movement of bodies through the house so that every encounter was mediated by walls and curtains and the protocol of who might be seen by whom. The begum's house was not a prison in any simple sense — it was large, well-furnished, staffed by women who had their own gossip and their own opinions about everyone in it — but it was a space from which the outside world had been carefully subtracted, and whatever happened within was concentrated by the subtraction.
The Child Arrives
I arrived and was placed under the begum's care. She was indifferent to me at first, preoccupied, listless, spending her days lying on her bed receiving massages from her personal masseuse-servant Rabbu. I was a small inconvenience — the household had been arranged around the begum and Rabbu, and a niece deposited for a few weeks did not require any rearrangement. I noticed that the begum looked tired, that her skin had a dullness I had been told elsewhere was the look of women who were not well, and that she spent most of her hours in her bedroom. The arrangement struck me as strange but not yet alarming. I had been sent to relatives' houses before. I knew that adults had their routines.
Rabbu
Rabbu was a darker-skinned, older, working-class woman, wiry and strong, with large hands and an unceremonious manner. Rabbu was always in the begum's room. She gave the begum long full-body oil massages that I watched from the side of the room without understanding what I was looking at. The begum's skin, I noticed, had begun to glow. She started eating again. She was animated when Rabbu was present, listless when Rabbu went away to visit her own family for a day or two. The other servants exchanged sarcastic comments about the begum and Rabbu — comments delivered with the particular dryness of women who had been working in the household long enough to have opinions about everyone in it. I heard them without processing what they meant. The nawab occasionally visited the house, stayed briefly, received his young students in another room, and left without entering the begum's quarters.
The Quilt
At night I slept in a bed in the begum's room. Nobody had consulted me about the arrangement. At night I heard sounds coming from under the begum's quilt — the lihaaf. The quilt rose and fell. There were sighs, then whispered words, then a kind of rhythmic movement I could not identify. I could not see what was happening under the quilt. I assumed, in the way children assume, that there must be some innocent explanation — perhaps an elephant was under the quilt, perhaps the begum was very cold and Rabbu was warming her up, perhaps some game was being played whose rules the adults had not told me. I was frightened without knowing why I was frightened. One night, in fright, I called out and asked what was going on. The begum's voice came back unusually sharp, unusually alert: go back to sleep. I went back to sleep. On subsequent nights the sounds continued and I continued to lie in my bed listening to the quilt move.
The Begum's History
I learned later — from the servants' gossip, from the sidelong remarks of older women — the earlier history of the begum's life. She had been married off in her teens with the usual ceremony, the usual jewellery, the usual expectations of a grand Muslim household. She had arrived at the nawab's house with her trunks and her maids and discovered very quickly that her husband had no use for her beyond the public role she was expected to perform. She retreated first into religion, praying five times a day, reading the Qur'an, fasting more than was required. The religion did not fill the hours. She retreated into food, eating enormous meals alone in her room, and then into illness, taking to her bed with a procession of symptoms no doctor could quite name. It was during one of these illnesses that Rabbu was hired. The begum's body had been failing in ways the household's women recognised as the specific failure of young wives placed in houses where nothing was being asked of them. Rabbu's massages, the older servants said, would bring her back. The massages did bring her back, in a way that no one had quite anticipated, and the household adjusted itself quietly around the new arrangement. I, of course, knew none of this at the time. I knew only what I saw.
Rabbu's Absence
Rabbu was called away to her own family for some days. In her absence the begum deteriorated visibly: she stopped eating, lay in bed without rising, grew irritable with the servants, lost her colour. I watched her and did not know what was wrong. When Rabbu returned, the begum revived almost at once — her appetite, her animation, her colour, all restored within hours. I saw this. I reported what I saw. What the adult reader assembles from it is the reader's own affair.
The Texture of the Days
Between Rabbu's absence and the ending, the daytime texture of the household continued as before. The warmth of the begum's intermittent attention to me coexisted with the unease of the nights, and the coexistence was what unsettled me most. The begum was not a monster. Rabbu was not a predator. The house was not a horror-show or a den of corruption. It was a house where a young woman who had been abandoned by her husband had found a form of life that sustained her, and a child who had been deposited in it for reasons unrelated to that life was witnessing the sustenance without being able to interpret it. The begum ate lunch, gave orders to the cook, fussed over my hair, complained about a niece who had not written. She was the same woman who lay under the quilt in the dark with Rabbu. The continuity between the daytime begum and the night-time quilt occupied the same rooms and the same hours, and I could not separate them.
The nawab himself I barely saw. He was mentioned rather than present — the boys were mentioned, the fact that he paid no attention to his wife was mentioned — but he never entered my world as a person. The begum's life was what had grown in the space his absence left, and the quilt in the dark was the emblem of what grows in such spaces when nothing interrupts the growth.
The Lifted Quilt
The final night went like every other night at first. I was in bed. The begum and Rabbu were under the quilt. The quilt was moving in the way it had moved on every other night I had spent in that room. And then something — an accidental movement, a pulled edge, the lamp flickering — caused the quilt to be momentarily lifted, and I saw, for a single moment, what was actually happening underneath it.
I will not tell you what I saw. You could give me a thousand rupees and I would not tell you what I saw under that quilt.
The Refusal
I have told you everything. I have told you what I saw, what I heard, what I felt in the dark room. And at the very moment when the quilt lifts and you might finally know, I withdraw. I will not say it. I will not name it for a thousand rupees. You, the reader, have been assembling what happened from everything I have given you — the begum's body, Rabbu's hands, the sounds in the dark, the rising and falling of the quilt — and you are holding an interpretation I will not confirm. If you have understood what was happening under the quilt, you understood it yourself, and the understanding is a form of knowledge the culture was organised to prevent. I have not told you what to think. You have thought it on your own behalf, and you may now, if you wish, examine why you thought it.
The prosecution that followed could not find a single obscene word. There is no sexual vocabulary in what I have told you. There is no explicit description of any act. There is a child who sees without understanding, a begum given entirely through indirect indications, a masseuse-servant given through presence and absence, a neglectful husband given through passing mentions of his boys, and a quilt that rises and falls in the night. The colonial obscenity statute was a blunt instrument designed for explicit material. This story slid between the statute's teeth and emerged on the other side intact.
What I did not name under the quilt is what my readers have been trying, one generation after another, to name for me ever since. I am content to let them try.
This post is part of Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To, a series on women writing against the constraints of their time. See the full collection →
Two editions in English: M. Asaduddin's Lifting the Veil (Penguin India, 2009) is the standard collected Chughtai in English, including Lihaaf in a fresh translation alongside the major short fiction and excerpts from her memoir. The Quilt and Other Stories, translated by Tahira Naqvi and Syeda S. Hameed (Sheep Meadow Press / Kali for Women, 1990), is the older but still authoritative selection that first carried Lihaaf into wide English-language circulation.
Penguin India edition. The standard collected Chughtai in English.
Sheep Meadow Press / Kali for Women edition. The story's first major English-language gathering.
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