Indian · 1915–1991
Ismat Chughtai was born in Badayun, Uttar Pradesh, the ninth of ten children in a Muslim family, and fought her way into a BA and a teaching degree against her family's plans for her marriage. She became the sharpest woman writer of the Urdu Progressive Writers' Movement, and her subject was the inside of the Muslim middle-class household—the boredom, the servants, the sexual knowledge of girls nobody thought were listening. In 1944 the British Indian government tried her for obscenity over the story Lihaaf, in which a neglected wife takes comfort from her maid under a quilt; she refused to apologise, and the case collapsed. She wrote novels, screenplays for Bombay films, and a memoir, and she quarrelled publicly and affectionately with Saadat Hasan Manto, who wrote the best essay about her. She won the Padma Shri and the Ghalib Award. She asked to be cremated rather than buried, and was.