University of Edinburgh
Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts
Issue 28 | Spring 2019
Title “Sacred Duty”: Walled Secularism in Independent India
Author Sheelalipi Sahana
Publication FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
Issue Number 28
Issue Date Spring 2019
Publication Date 28/06/2019
Editors Chris Jardine and Dominic Richard
FORUM claims non-exclusive rights to reproduce this article electronically (in full or in part) and to publish this work in
any such media current or later developed. The author retains all rights, including the right to be identified as the author
wherever and whenever this article is published, and the right to use all or part of the article and abstracts, with or
without revision or modification in compilations or other publications. Any latter publication shall recognise FORUM as
the original publisher.
FORUM I ISSUE 28 1
“Sacred Duty”: Walled Secularism in Independent India
Sheelalilpi Sahana
University of Edinburgh
Ismat Chughtai, an Indian writer in the 20th Century was influential in the Urdu literary scene for her
role in furthering the women’s cause. This paper focuses on her translated short story “Sacred Duty” in
which the sanctity of ‘secularism’ is questioned by addressing interfaith marriages in order to polarise
religious orthodoxy of older generations with that of the flippancy of the youth. It unfurls the pseudo-
fraternal form of coexistence of the middle and upper class ‘progressives’ that was practiced to appease
their own sense of modernity. By contextualising this within the communal riots of post-partition India,
a seeming anxiety is noticed within the newer generations in contending with their ‘duty’ to the nation
and religion. Offsetting this against the postcolonial scholarship by Partha Chatterjee based on Benedict
Anderson’s notion of an “imagined community,” this story remarks on the strength of that argument in
view of the religious boundaries that consecrate such a nation. The married couple Samina and Tashar’s
stance heralds a crucial question about the possibility of climbing over this wall drawn out by Hindus and
Muslims and escaping this ‘community’ altogether. Through this analysis, the restricted nature of Indian
secularism post-Independence is highlighted as propagating divisionist ideology.
The battle of our political freedom is fought and won. But another battle, no less
important than what we have won, still faces us. It is a battle with no outside enemy…
It is a battle with our own selves.
- Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru
Ismat Chughtai (1915-1991) was an Indian writer, who spoke up against the rising
issues regarding women and familial ties before and after the Partition of India. Cited as
a controversial figure for her bold description of female homosexuality in the short story
“The Quilt” (Lihaaf published in 1942) for which she went to court on charges of obscenity,
Chughtai was unabashed in voicing the myriad experiences that the women of India faced
daily, drawing closely from her own experience of growing up in a middle-class Muslim
family in Uttar Pradesh in northern India. She wrote exclusively in Urdu, a language that
surmounted the literary scene through its proliferation by celebrated writers like Saadat
Hasan Manto and Kaifi Azmi, among others, all part of the Indian Progressive Writers’
Association that began in 1936. The English translations of Chughtai’s oeuvre by Tahira
Naqvi and Syeda S. Hameed in the 1990s opened up a global dissemination of the author’s
work which had been widely appreciated in India throughout her long and diverse career,
FORUM I ISSUE 28 2
as a writer of books and screenplays. It is these translations which I will be using for the
purposes of my argument.
Although academic criticism has focused on her feminist prose and realistic
portrayal of everyday life, the scope of this paper is a forgotten short story written later in
her career called “Sacred Duty” (Muqaddas Farz) published in 1983, on which there
appears to be no scholarship apart from a recent dissertation by Harvard University
doctoral student Sadaf Jaffer (2015). The resurgent attention being paid to the story now
is, I believe, due to its topical subject of secularism in contemporary India; a topic that
has postcolonial scholars questioning its relevance and resonance decades after it was
adopted in Independent India’s Constitution. “Sacred Duty” was written following closely
on the heels of the 42nd Amendment Act (1976) that incorporated the adjective ‘secular’
to the Indian Preamble, in the wake of the National Emergency enforced by the Indira
Gandhi governmenti. This story is seen to question the sanctity of this term ‘secular’ by
addressing interfaith marriages in order to polarise religious orthodoxy of older
generations with that of the flippancy of the youth regarding religious matters.
Through a comic, sarcastic tone that sets off the embedded communal tensions
between Hindus and Muslims, this story unfurls the pseudo-fraternal form of coexistence
of the middle and upper class ‘progressives’ that was practised to appease their own sense
of modernity. By contextualising this within the communal riots of post-partition India,
an anxiousness is noticed within the newer generations in contending simultaneously
with their ‘duty’ to the nation and religion. Offsetting this against the scholarship
provided by Benedict Anderson who argues that a nation is an “imagined community”
(Anderson 6), this story remarks on the strength of that argument in view of the religious
boundaries that consecrate such a nation, following Partha Chatterjee’s postcolonial angle
to Anderson’s point. The married couple Samina and Tashar’s stance heralds a crucial
question about the possibility of climbing over this wall drawn out by Hindus and
Muslims and escaping this ‘community’ altogether, which this paper aims to understand.
FORUM I ISSUE 28 3
Communalism in post-Partition India
As defined by historian and critic Gyanendra Pandey, “[i]n its common Indian usage the
word ‘communalism’ refers to a condition of suspicion, fear and hostility between
members of different religious communities.” (Pandey 2006 8) While this sentiment of
religious consternation within communities predates British colonialism, Pandey
proposes that its present form is a recent phenomenon abetted by colonial interference
that used it to further the imperial agenda (14). In creating all-India Hindu and all-India
Muslim communities, the Empire linked the communal question with that of nationalism
(16, emphases in original). Thus, the inextricable ties between the two concepts begs the
question not only of their interdependence but also of their parasitical nature in India.
What Pandey suggests reconceives the idea of a nation as being tangibly linked to the rise
of communalism which saw its culmination in the Two-Nation theory put forward by the
Muslim League which led to the Partition of India into India and Pakistan on the eve of
Independence from the British Crown in 1947. What is celebrated as the greatest triumph
in Indian national history comes with an attached realisation of the triumph also of
communalism that had the power to tear apart a multi-religious country that had co-
existed for centuries before East India Company began trade relations. Pakistan was
created out of animosity and fear for a Hindu-majoritarian country that, upon
independence, would take over the imperial system of domination over the native subject
whose suppression would be supposedly inevitable. The debate about whether the
creation of Pakistan was the right decision or not is ongoing and Sisyphean, and not the
intention of this paper to settle. What is of interest is the relation between nationalism
and religion which Ismat Chughtai revisits in the 1980s, three decades after the Partition.
The date of publication of “Sacred Duty” is crucial to our understanding of the
psyche of a society post-reconfiguration to gleam its current status in light of post-
Partition trauma and consequence. The 1980s saw a resurgence of communal riots and
violent destruction between the Hindu, Sikh and Muslim communities following the end
of the Indian Emergency in 1977 (Pandey 2001 6). One year after the story was published,
in 1984, the Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh
bodyguard as part of a Blue Star Operation that saw further violence against the Sikhs (in
retaliation). Conditions further escalated in the ’90s when the Babri Masjid was
demolished by Hindu right-wing parties; this caused the largest riots in the country in
FORUM I ISSUE 28 4
recent years with more than 2000 casualties on both Hindu and Muslim sides (Pandey
2001 16).
Chughtai’s text comes to serve as a document that grapples with the conditions
created by this hostile environment after Partition. However, what has always fascinated
literary critics about her work is the careful disentanglement of the private and public
spheres that women and men of upper-class Muslim families occupied respectively. In
“Sacred Duty,” there is no overt mention of any communal tension unlike her other stories
“Roots” and “Green Bangles,” either locally or on a national level; on the surface, there
appears to be peaceful relations between the two communities. This is explained by
Samina’s mother Begum Siddiqi rather desperately upon hearing of Samina’s elopement
with the Hindu boy Tashar, “No, we have nothing against Hindus” (Chughtai 2004 22,
emphasis in original). Samina’s father Siddiqi Saheb corroborates this sentiment, saying
he “had never been involved in a dispute over religious convictions” (22). Despite these
testimonies, their actions following their daughter’s ‘betrayal’ suggest otherwise.
Chughtai’s clever use of temporal and spatial faculties in her prose allude to more than
her plot addresses. By making Tashar hail from a Hindu family in Allahabad (in Uttar
Pradesh), it forms the subtext for the rising violence that Chughtai experienced in her
home state. This story anticipates such atrocities that were germinating within the
conscience of the two communities since the riots began before Partition. While
describing Tashar Trivedi’s father Sethji as a “king-maker” that had ties with the “winning
party” (Chughtai 2004 26), her casual insertion of the adjectives “staunch Mahasabhi”ii
(Hindu) are enough to signal a battle between the two families that exceeds their
immediate social sphere.
Up until the point when the Siddiqi and Trivedi families’ religious sanctity was kept
intact, they maintained the illusion of mutually supporting the various communities
residing in India. The moment Tashar and Samina’s elopement causes an imbalance in
the power relations between the two groups, they begin to simultaneously claim a
stronghold over the other. Sethji beats Siddiqi Saheb to it by accepting Samina as a
member of their family by forcing her to convert to Hinduism and abide by the rituals of
a Hindu marriage ceremony. The pettiness of his scheme is conveyed to the reader
through the elaborate news coverage it receives, which riles up Siddiqi Saheb. In order to
get even, he in turn devises another plan by which to reconvert Samina and Tashar to
FORUM I ISSUE 28 5
Islam. In the midst of all this plotting, from Siddiqi Saheb escapes a long-suppressed
anxiety pertaining to the days of Partition: “This is a nation of Hindus, after all. Ah, such
fine positions were offered to him in Pakistan, but he had been so full of the progressive
spirit then — such stupidity!” (Chughtai 2004 24-25, emphasis in original). This not only
notifies the reader that the story is in fact set after the Partition of India, but also that the
feelings of regret and vulnerability still linger. After decades of living in a country that he
considers his home, this one instance makes the nation itself sacrilegious. In this lies what
I believe to be a significant anxiety within the Muslims that chose to remain in India
instead of leaving everything behind and joining their ‘brothers’ on the other side of the
border. That such sentiments resurface at such a time, i.e. the 1980s, is a nod to the rising
communal tensions that parallel those of the two families.
Chughtai’s Role as a Progressive Writer
Siddiqi Saheb’s insistence on being a ‘progressive’ calls upon a history of independent
India’s progress and modernity. In Chughtai’s case, it also refers to her involvement with
the All-India Progressive Writers Association (PWA); they were a group of radical literary
figures that used realism as an artistic technique (Flemming 200) in their works to
capture not only the naked reality of human suffering in light of the Indian Independence
Movement (especially Partition) but also the changing face of India that was moving
towards modern sensibilities. According to literary historian Rakhshanda Jalil who
studied the PWA, for them, “the partition was an opportunity to dwell on the present”
(Jalil 3). Having been influenced and also contributed to such a discourse, Chughtai’s
conception of a ‘progressive’ was shaped by this organisation’s motivation for uncovering
the truth from the oppressive structures of society and relaying them to their readers in
stark language and diction. It is also imperative to locate the character of Siddiqi Saheb
against Chughtai’s own father who was liberal and progressive as he educated his
daughter, against the norm. However, she had to resist her family’s pleas to give up
education after primary school and fought her way to acquire a B.A. from university
(Parekh). Often invoked as one of the “daughters of reform” (qtd. in Gopal 67), Chughtai
grew up in a family that supported (to a certain extent) her desire to write and publish.
Nevertheless, she published her first few stories anonymously which were mistakenly
FORUM I ISSUE 28 6
attributed to her brother Mirza Azim Baig Chughtai who was already an established writer
by then (Parekh).
This duality of freedom which, on the one hand, allowed her to be a free-spirited
girl that spent most of her childhood playing boys’ games with her brothers and, on the
other, to lead a more restricted life that she was expected to lead upon becoming a ‘lady’
impacted her works of art in which she allowed the readers, for the first time, a glimpse
into the private lives of Muslim women. Her stories thus have strong inflections of gender,
sexuality and the domesticity that come with dealing with complex female characters that
transgress these boundaries and question them. In “Sacred Duty,” Siddiqi Saheb, “who is
a product of a highly-principled, truly Muslim family” (Chughtai 25, emphasis in
original), cannot fathom his daughter’s audacity to go against his religion to fulfil her own
wishes, since he never conceived of the existence of her wishes in the first place. In a
manner similar to their contradictory relations with Hindus, who they have nothing
against but also cannot stand to be associated with, this dilemma caused by Samina makes
the parents revaluate their ideological precepts. “It was true that Siddiqi Saheb was a
progressive; allowing girls to obtain a higher education and letting them marry whomever
they pleased — he certainly believed in all of this.” (Chughtai 2004 21, my emphasis).
Critic Parul Bhandari says that this new form of ‘modern marriage’ “rests in the ability to
appropriate aspects of modernization and reconfigure elements of love, morality, and
honour in which the family continues to play an important role” (Bhandari 132). However,
when a suitable marriage proposal arrives for Samina, despite her desire to continue her
education, “the girl was silenced with a few words of censure” (Chughtai 2004 21). Such
expressions outline an emergent form of progressive thought after the partition of the
country that was straddling the orthodox spaces of the past and present.
A sharp divide between ‘belief’ (as Siddiqi put it) and reality is seen to germinate,
that is resonant of the larger problem of secularism that is practiced in India. Questioning
his behaviour, he thought “[w]ould Tashar have been able to woo her in her own home if
her parents had not been so liberal?” (Chughtai 2004 25, my emphasis) What emerges is
a self-interest that banks on religiosity to thrive in the face of conflict. For Samina’s father,
being progressive ensured entry into the elite ranks of the social strata, it promised a life
of peaceful relations in which he would seemingly remain untouched by the political and
communal waves that inevitably engulfed the working class in its throes for victory over
FORUM I ISSUE 28 7
the masses. When Siddiqi Saheb proudly asserts that he “had been living a life of quiet
respectability as a member of an enlightened social class” (21), he acknowledges the
privilege of inhabiting such a space that allows for his pseudo-progressive attitudes to
prevail in order to keep up the guise in ‘modern’ India. Samina, who is a product of a
newer generation of thinkers, calls out this bigotry by labelling it as a “farce” (Chughtai
2004 28) that she refuses to succumb to.
Despite drawing from her own experience that was restricted to a particular
section, i.e. middle-class Muslim families, her prose is rich in its critique of the current
political scenario of India. Being hailed as “self-critical literature” by critic Priyamvada
Gopal, Chughtai’s work “identified an ‘us’ and an ‘our’ in the interests of reconstruction
needed to be developed” in postcolonial literatures (Gopal 16). Published in the ’80s when
Nehruvian Secularismiii was being replaced by jingoistic fervour along religious lines that
was tearing apart entire communities of people, this rupture is visible in “Sacred Duty”
through the actions of the older generation i.e. Samina and Tashar’s parents. Tashar’s
father Sethji (Hindu) becomes an active political correspondent (as a Mahasabhi) with
ties to right-wing extremists that are perpetrating violence against Muslims; Samina’s
father Siddiqi Saheb on the other hand, while adopting a more neutral stance on the
matter of religious dogmatism, still betrays a preferentiality for his ‘own kind’ by erecting
a wall against the ‘other’ that his daughter surmounts.
Discussing the role of writers at large and the members of PWA in particular,
Chughtai wrote in a powerful essay a couple of years after Partition that Tahira Naqvi
translated in 2000 titled “Communal Violence and Literature,” that the need of the hour
was to capture, with authenticity, the harrowing effects of a division that separated people
on the basis of religion. She said, “With every aspect of life disturbed by this earthshaking
event, how could poets and writers possibly sit on the side without saying a word? How
could literature, which bears close ties to life, avoid getting its shirt-front wet when life
was drenched in blood?” (Chughtai 2000 445) Thus, “Sacred Duty” manages to capture
the changing temperament of a society that had not, and still has not, fully recovered from
the havoc caused in 1947, that was encouraged to adopt cogent secularism as a legislative
motto, while being a witness to renewed sectarian violence. In such turbulence, Chughtai
manages to introspect the relation between the identities that people had come to
FORUM I ISSUE 28 8
impersonate as ‘progressives’. Religious identities come to circulate as national identities
in the effort to gauge its similarities.
Conception of Secularism in India
Siddiqui Saheb recollects his rationale during Partition in his present moment of crisis:
“can’t leave my country, I will be buried in the earth that gave me life” (Chughtai 25). His
country is the place of birth, a place that is reconstituted as the earth. Independent India
was in fact only created recently, on 15 August 1947. A nation, as Benedict Anderson
argues, is “an imagined political community, and imagined as both inherently limited and
sovereign” (Anderson 6). It is ‘imagined’ because of a sense of “communion” that is felt
by a group for each other, without having any physical conception of its individuals (6); it
is based on an affinity that is as intangible as the nation that it creates. While his account
focuses on Western modes that lead to this ‘creation’, his work in the Indian context leads
to a reassessment of the nation as being ‘imagined’ into being in a dissimilar manner to
the West. Partha Chatterjee’s critique of this very homogenisation can be found in “Whose
Imagined Communities?” where he argues for a different methodology with which to
approach the postcolonial communities for whom a nation was created not on the basis
of similarity but rather intrinsic difference from its colonisers (Chatterjee 216). Drawing
from these sources, the central problem of “Sacred Duty” is the relationality between
religion and nationalism; what is provided as a solution to mete out the differences is
secularism which, argued in this paper, is inadequate and flawed.
Anderson provides an instance from Marco Polo’s account of Kublai Khan that
detects “the seeds of a territorialization of faiths which foreshadows the language of many
nationalists (‘our’ nation is ‘the best’ — in a competitive, comparative field) (Anderson
17). In India, this sentiment is appropriated as ‘our religion dictates our nation’, especially
in light of the mass conversions into Christianity that were being promoted by the British
during their rule, which the Indians tried to resist. Thus, in a moment of condescension,
Siddiqui is led to pronounce “This is a nation of Hindus after all” (Chughtai 2004 24)
aligning the discussion in line with what right-wing Hindus and Muslims argued about a
nation being constructed on sectarian lines. Despite its political motives, the desire for
Pakistan germinated along this pattern that believed the country (after independence)
would be governed by Hindus, compromising Muslim representation. However, this
FORUM I ISSUE 28 9
Western conception was contested by M. K. Gandhi, the Indian National Congress and by
millions who did not believe in this reduced notion of a nation. Siddiqui himself did not
succumb to this justification during Partition, instead proposing his birthplace as his
nation, irrespective of religious majority; he chose to remain in India.
While this line of thought did not echo universally (proven by the creation of
Pakistan), it nevertheless promised the minorities of the country that post-Partition,
India would not give in to the Western concept of a ‘nation’ by continuing to house people
of all faiths. It was this confidence that allowed the Siddiqui family to stay back; this
confidence was affirmed by the ruling party of Independent India (Indian National
Congress) that had promised the masses a secular New India. The official inclusion of the
term ‘secular’ into the Constitution in 1977 further solidified the country’s stance on anti-
religious sentiment.
Ismat Chughtai’s project raises the question of this official implementation, in the
context of the widespread sectarian violence that followed in the years after this
Amendment. As mentioned, the families in the story, without directly engaging in the
discourse of sectarianism, reveal the “farce” of this mode of secularism. Chughtai does
this by focusing on inter-faith marriages that complicate the superficial peacefulness
between the two communities and reveal the divisionism masquerading as secularism.
When Samina and Tashar elope, shame and embarrassment supersede their ‘progressive’
outlook; in having to implement their “belief” (just as in the case of girls’ education), they
arrive at a crossroads and choose to follow the direction of orthodoxy. What separates this
approach from religious fanaticism is the backseat that religion itself takes in this tussle
between the two families. For Siddiqui Saheb, it is not the religious transgression that
Samina commits which infuriates him, but rather the power imbalance created by such a
transgression. It is a “game” (Chughtai 2004 28) that blurs the boundaries. What comes
across as ‘sacred’ in “Sacred Duty” is not Samina and Tashar’s duty owing to their
respective religions, but to their community. The game played by both parties is a
ridiculous attempt at upping the ante against the opponents by converting and
reconverting the couple. First, Samina is converted to Hinduism so as to be accepted by
the groom’s family, then Tashar and Samina are forced to reconvert to Islam pertaining
to Siddiqui’s wishes. This back-and-forth undermines the sacrosanct claims of their
religiosity by inversely showing the ease with which it is possible to break down these
FORUM I ISSUE 28 10
boundaries. In trying to prevent collisions with the ‘other’ religion, the parents themselves
prove the futility of their resistance by inviting the ‘other’ into their space; the example of
Tashar being converted to Islam is an effort to keep the family ‘pure’ but actually is a
warped notion of religious purity itself as even a Hindu can become one of their own
within seconds.
This is not in any capacity an indication of their secularism; on the contrary, it
resembles a self-patronising technique to prove to their respective communities that they
remain ‘untouched’ by the other group. The parents’ efforts to deny the ‘inter-faith’ aspect
of the union shows the walls that are erected that cannot contend with such a ‘mixed’
marriage. For them, either both will be Hindu or both will be Muslim; they cannot be a
mixture of two. I see this struggle as representing the larger purview of secularism (as it
is adopted in India) which, although guarantees the legal right to co-exist and to be heard
without discrimination, cannot account for the decision of the communities to stay within
their boundaries. In a bid to problematize this further, Chughtai alerts the reader of a
clause mentioned in the civil marriage certificate form that Samina and Tashar sign in
accordance with the civil ceremony that the State presides over. It states that “neither of
you [Samina and Tashar] belongs to any particular faith” (Chughtai 2004 32). Is this a
denial on the part of the Indian government to similarly accept inter-faith marriages?
While the parents try to convert both to a particular religion, the law strips them of either
faith. In a nation that claims to be secular, the law itself fails to acknowledge the possible
breakdown of sectarian boundaries. Partha Chatterjee claims that when the idea of
‘family’ that is intrinsic to Indian national culture is modernised, it is done through a
process that retains the “tradition” of the practice so as to offer a different version of the
Westernised concept of modernity, which is still Indian (Chatterjee 220). However, in
“Sacred Duty,” modern law that conducts ‘civil’ marriages, does so on an anti-religious
mandate that complies with the ‘secular’ outlook of the nation.
It is in the midst of this confusion that the story ends with Samina and Tashar
running away, leaving behind a letter addressed to Samina’s parents. They write jointly,
“we don’t subscribe to any religion […] We have no religion.” (Chughtai 2004 37) They,
the newer generation, deny their religious affinities and comply with the state-ordained
regulation to counteract the previous generation’s obstinacy. Yet, they believe in God (37).
Is this what secularism constitutes now? Going from all-religions to no-religion? The
FORUM I ISSUE 28 11
post-Partition India, instead of combating communalism by breaking down its walls and
allowing the various communities to ameliorate their relations, strengthens them by
denying the very possibility of such relations. The couple runs away to a place inaccessible
to their parents and the readers where such alliances are welcomed; one wonders if such
a place exists in India.
Sadaf Jaffer in his doctoral dissertation, which is the only extant piece of recent
scholarship on this story, quotes Chughtai’s preference for a “religion of humanity” (Jaffer
27), which further corroborates her stance against the current legislative system that fails
to incorporate all religions under this larger umbrella term. If Indian nationalism was
‘imagined’ by the masses in opposition to the Western forms, as Chatterjee argues, in the
quest to form an authentic national identity, religion is compromised. The newer
generation recognises the unscalable wall that exists within religious communities despite
seeming pseudo-progressive and chooses to relinquish religion altogether in the efforts to
be able to ‘mix’ with each other. “Sacred Duty” manages to trace this anxiousness within
the family members in order to question the meaning of secularism as a national decree.
Conclusion
Ismat Chughtai’s 1983 story “Sacred Duty” (Muqaddas Farz) obliquely touches on
pertinent questions that were germinating in the Indian national psyche during the
aftermath of the Partition that displaced millions of people across the borders and proved
not only to be a culmination of the communal divisionist framework but also a
springboard for further violence. Set a couple of decades later, this sectarian sentiment
lingers below the surface and festers until it finds the opportune moment to resurface
while accounting for inter-faith marriages. Having drawn from Gyanendra Pandey’s
historical theories and chronologies of postcolonialism and communalism, this paper has
intended to trace its bearing on a text of this kind that comes to be shaped by these social
operatives. Considering Chughtai’s style of writing which invokes a ‘realist’ technique,
much like the other writers of Progressive Writers’ Association, this history adds to the
meaning-making of the text by underlining the paradoxical relationship that the Hindus
and Muslims come to share after being declared as residents of a ‘secular’ nation. This
challenges the concept of nation itself which is created from a sense of ownership that ties
in with other descriptive categories of identity such as religion. Drawing from the
FORUM I ISSUE 28 12
preliminary study by Benedict Anderson, compounded by Partha Chatterjee’s later
addition in the context of India, “Sacred Duty” calls into question the “imagination”
behind the creation of Indian nationalism that fought against the ‘Divide and Rule’ policy
of the British Crown by advocating a mode of secularism that was just as separatist.
Through the inclusion/exclusion that Samina and Tashar experience, from which they
eventually try and escape, the walled nature of the secularism of post-Partition
Independent India is revealed. Just as the law is incapable of conceiving of a marriage
(literally and figuratively) between the two religious communities without compromising
that identity itself, the parents cannot fathom a relation with the ‘other’ in which the
boundaries may remain intact. What this story hints at is a national dilemma surrounding
the sectarian communities that exist within the larger secular community of India.
FORUM I ISSUE 28 13
Works Cited
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Spread and Origin of Nationalism.
1983. Verso, 2006.
Bhandari, Parul. “Makings of Modern Marriage: Choice, Family, and the Matchmakers”.
Exploring Indian Modernities: Ideas and Practices. Springer, 2018, pp. 131-49,
SpringerLink, https://doi-org.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/10.1007/978-981-10-7557-5_7.
Accessed 2 Feb. 2019.
Chatterjee, Partha. “Whose Imagined Community?”. Mapping the Nation. Verso, 1996, pp. 214-
25.
Chughtai, Ismat. “Communal Violence and Literature”. Translated by Tahira Naqvi. Annual of
Urdu Studies, vol. 15, 2000, http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/15/29naqviViolence.pdf.
Accessed 31 Jan. 2019.
---. “Sacred Duty”. A Chughtai Collection. 1990. Translated by Tahira Naqvi, Women Unlimited,
2004, pp. 20-38.
Flemming, Leslie A. “Out of the Zenana: New Translations of Ismat Chughtai’s Work”. Annual
of Urdu Studies, vol. 10, 1995, pp. 200-07, Proquest Literature Online,
https://bit.ly/2SIxQx4. Accessed 30 Jan. 2019.
Gopal, Priyamvada. Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to
Independence. Routledge, 2005.
Jaffer, Sadaf. Ismat Chughtai, Progressive Literature and Formations of the Indo-Muslim Secular,
1911-1991. 2015. Harvard University, PhD Dissertation. Digital Access to Scholarship at
Harvard (DASH).
Jalil, Rakhshanda. “From Fasana to Afsana”. Liking Progress, Loving Change: A Literary History
of the Progressive Writers' Movement in Urdu. Oxford UP, 2014. Oxford Scholarship
Online, 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198096733.001.0001. Accessed 24 Jan. 2019.
Pandey, Gyanendra. Remembering Partition : Violence, Nationalism, and History in India.
Cambridge UP, 2001.
---. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. Oxford UP, 2006. Oxford
Scholarship Online, 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198077305.001.0001. Accessed 30 Jan.
2019.
FORUM I ISSUE 28 14
Parekh, Rauf. “Ismat Chughtai: her life, thought and art”. DawnNews, 30 Aug. 2015,
https://www.dawn.com/news/1203638. Accessed 3 Feb. 2019.
FORUM I ISSUE 28 15
Author Biography
Sheelalipi Sahana is a student of MSc. Literature and Modernity at the University of
Edinburgh. Her interest in women’s contribution to the modernist movement is reflected
in her past work on Woolf, Mansfield and du Maurier. She is now venturing into an
ethnographic parallel of this in the Indian context.
Endnotes
i
From 1975-77, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi enforced a state of Emergency in India that curtailed the civil
liberties of citizens, such as media censorship. The elections were suspended and the country was in a state
of chaos. For a thorough account of the event, refer P.N. Dhar’s Indira Gandhi, the 'Emergency', and Indian
Democracy (Oxford UP, 2000).
ii
A ‘mahasabhi’ is a member of the Hindu Mahasabha, a right-wing Hindu nationalist political party in
India.
iii
India’s first Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru advocated a form of secularism that placed
emphasis on humanism and democratic representation. For more on his views, refer Perumal’s article
“Nehru and Secularism” (1987).
