Voicing the Choice: Metaphor in Ismat Chughtai’s Short Story—“The Quilt”

Abstract

Ismat Chughtai is a well-known feminist author in twentieth-century Urdu literature. She is given a special place in South-Asian Feminist Studies because of the way she interweaves the discourse of female sexuality with certain stylistic patterns. In her short story, “The Quilt,” the voiceless woman character, Begum Jaan, holds on to her choice regarding her sexuality despite living in a time and a society immersed in patriarchy. The unconventional and ‘unladylike’ choice of homosexuality would not be well-received if openly expressed. Chughtai still writes about this choice in a very suggestive manner through the powerful metaphor of the quilt in “The Quilt”. The metaphor speaks louder than the protagonist herself, thus becoming a means to voice the choice of the woman in the story. This also attributes the metaphor with the quality of a living character in Chughtai’s narrative technique. Through this technique, Chughtai has contributed to the discourse of female sexuality in the Urdu literary subculture of her time. Taking the twentieth-century definitions of metaphor and a theoretical frame of Simone de Beauvoir’s discussion on female sexuality, this paper takes into account this short story, “The Quilt,” to examine, in a qualitative approach, the nature of the choice made by the female protagonist Begum Jaan and how the metaphor is used to voice her choice in the story.