The Heart Breaks Free & The Wild One

Ismat Chughtai, Tahira Naqvi

Translated by Tahira Naqvi

Paperback

978-93-88326-52-0

Women Unlimited, 2018

Language: English

152 pages

5.5"x8.5"

INR 299.00

In stock

SKU

978-93-88326-52-0

In The Heart Breaks Free, set in pre-Independence UP, Bua, a free-spirited woman in a conservative Muslim household, is goaded into submission by the women in the family. But even as Bua surrenders to the forces of circumstance, Qudsia Apa, an uncomplaining abandoned wife, stuns everyone by transforming into a rebel. She rejects the life of celibacy and denial forced upon her and picks her own life partner, showing future generations the value and pleasure of subversion. The Wild One is the love story of a servant girl, Asha, and her ‘master’, Puran, in a feudal household. When Puran can’t muster the strength to defy his class, it is gutsy Asha who manages to beat the odds and win him for herself. Provocative, witty and intensely human as always, Chughtai delivers in these novellas scathing critiques of the cant and hypocrisy of Indian society.

Ismat Chughtai

Ismat Chughtai is one of Urdu’s most important writers. Feminist by instinct, long before it was fashionable to be one, she was a progressive who knew that literature changes more lives than political pamphlets can. At a time when women were writing only about how to be a good wife and mother, she set about exposing middle class mores and social hypocrisy, through sharp observation and a rapier-like wit. Chughtai is the author of dozens of short stories, four novellas, three novels, essays, reminiscences and plays. With her husband, Shahid Lateef, she produced and co-directed six films and produced six more independently.

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Tahira Naqvi

Tahira Naqvi is a translator, writer, and Clinical Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, where she teaches Urdu language and literature. She has translated the works of Sa’adat Hasan Manto, Khadija Mastur, Hajra Masroor, and the majority of works by Ismat Chughtai, into English. She has published two collections of short stories, Attar of Roses and Other Stories of Pakistan and Dying in a Strange Country. The History Teacher of Lahore is her first novel. Naqvi grew up in Lahore.

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