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 the Urdu literary magazine Adab-i-Latif. She was twenty-seven, married to the film-maker Shahid Latif, and had been publishing short fiction for barely five years. Within weeks the story had generated complaints from readers who considered its content obscene, and in 1944 Chughtai and the editor received summonses to the Lahore High Court on charges under Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code — the same colonial obscenity statute being used against her friend Saadat Hasan Manto, whose story Bu was being prosecuted on the same docket.
Chughtai was born in Badayun, in the United Provinces, in 1915, the ninth of ten children. Her father's civil-service postings moved the family across northern India. She fought her way into formal education, completing a B.A. and B.Ed. at Aligarh Muslim University in the 1930s — one of the first Muslim women from her class to be university-educated — and joined the Progressive Writers' Movement in her early twenties. She was a writer of stories, novels, screenplays and essays, and a working figure in the Bombay film industry; Lihaaf was a fifteen-page early story that overshadowed everything else she did.
What makes Lihaaf canonical is its technique of indication without naming. The story establishes a relationship between two women inside a Muslim zenana with enough clarity that adult readers cannot miss what it is, while refusing to name it anywhere in the text. It contains no sexual vocabulary. Its erotic content is carried almost entirely by the rising and falling of a quilt in the dark, observed by a child narrator who sees but does not understand. The prosecution could not find a single obscene word. Lihaaf made Chughtai notorious across the Urdu-speaking world and opened a space in South Asian literature in which women's interior and erotic lives inside the sex-segregated household could be written about at all.
The Prohibition
The first layer was the social prohibition against women of her class writing at all. Middle-class Muslim families in the 1920s United Provinces did not generally educate daughters beyond basic literacy. Chughtai's older brother, himself a published writer, encouraged her, but other relatives were openly hostile. Her pursuit of university education involved threats of running away from home and a sustained refusal to marry until she had finished her studies. Aligarh Muslim University was a battleground in itself; she was among the first Muslim women admitted to its programmes, and the resistance she encountered there was not merely social but bureaucratic.
The second layer was the specific prohibition against her subject matter. The interior of the zenana — the women's quarter where female relatives and servants spent their lives in the structural absence of men — was not considered appropriate material for literary treatment. The erotic life of the zenana in particular, including forms of intimacy between women confined together in a space from which men had been excluded, was considered unspeakable. To write about it was to betray a confidence the culture maintained precisely by not discussing it, and to invite the double charge of indecency and communal disloyalty. Muslim respectability politics in the late-colonial period required that the zenana be presented to the outside world as a space of female piety and domestic virtue. Chughtai was proposing to write what actually happened inside it.
The third layer was the colonial obscenity apparatus. Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code criminalised "obscene" material without precise definition, leaving determination to colonial judges. Manto was tried under it multiple times. Prosecution carried the possibility of imprisonment, ruinous fines, and a chilling effect on editors that was often the real point of the exercise. When the summons arrived in 1944, Chughtai was a young writer at the beginning of her career, newly a mother, with no assurance she would not lose everything she had spent her adolescence fighting for. The Raj's apparatus and the community's expectations were aligned against her by accident rather than design, and the alignment was no less effective for being accidental.
The Strategy
The technical craft was what saved the story in court. Chughtai built Lihaaf around a child narrator whose observations are exact but whose understanding is incomplete, arranging every significant element to be communicated through what the child sees without knowing what it means. There is no explicit sexual vocabulary. The erotic content is carried by the movement of a quilt in the dark and by the household's sidelong observations. This was not a concession to propriety but a compositional decision that made the story more disturbing, because it forced each reader to supply the interpretation the text refused. The child narrator was her defence in advance against any prosecution that would need to point to a specific obscene word.
The personal refusal was what saved her outside the courtroom. Friends and relatives urged her to apologise, withdraw, find some formula to make the case go away. She refused. She travelled to Lahore for the trial with her husband Shahid Latif, who backed her decision at risk to his own film career. Manto, tried simultaneously for Bu, made common cause with her — the photographs of the two of them outside the Lahore court, young and unrepentant, are now part of the iconography of South Asian literary modernism. Chughtai's lawyer asked the prosecution to identify a single obscene word and the prosecution could not. The case was dismissed.
The deeper strategic choice was to build a career around the subject matter that had nearly destroyed her. After Lihaaf she kept writing about Muslim women's interior lives with the same directness, producing Terhi Lakeer in 1943 and a long succession of stories extending the zenana's interior into print year by year. She also moved into the Bombay film industry, writing screenplays and using the income to sustain her literary work through decades when the Urdu market alone could not have supported her. She did not retract, did not soften, did not accept that the trial had defined the limits of what she would write. The pattern of her later career was the strategic answer to Lihaaf's prosecution: she would not be reduced to one story.
The Price and the Legacy
The price was the permanent distortion of her reputation. Lihaaf became the story Chughtai was identified with, at the expense of her longer and more ambitious later work. For the rest of her life interviewers opened with it, anthologists foregrounded it, critics measured her against it. She resented the way a fifteen-page story had overshadowed Terhi Lakeer, Masooma, the later novels and the body of film work. Some male colleagues in the Progressive Writers' Movement quietly distanced themselves; certain publishers became cautious; certain relatives stopped speaking to her. She never received the institutional honours her male contemporaries — Manto included, once his rehabilitation was under way — eventually received. She died in Bombay in October 1991, aged seventy-six, and asked to be cremated rather than buried according to Muslim custom, a final gesture that placed her outside the communal categories she had spent her life refusing.
The legacy is the opening of Urdu literature to female sexuality as a subject that could be represented without apology. Before Lihaaf such material did not exist in print in sustained form. After it, a space had been forced open that later writers — Qurratulain Hyder, Krishna Sobti, and the generation of South Asian women who began publishing in the 1960s and 1970s — could enter without fighting the same battle from the beginning. Scholars of queer South Asian literature and of women's writing have both claimed the story as foundational, sometimes from competing critical positions, and Chughtai's refusal to confirm any single interpretation has kept the argument productively unresolved. What Chughtai refused to name under the quilt is what her readers have been trying to name for her ever since, and the impossibility of pinning it down is part of what has kept the story 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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