Rare Ismat Chughtai Interview: I am a Photographer, not a Painter
A few minutes through her interview with Radio Pakistan Ismat Chughtai makes the statement about her being a photographer and not a painter. While the interviewer keeps insisting, perhaps as a show of humility, that according to him she is both, Chughtai won’t budge from her position. A writer who counted among her influences Angaaray (more on them here) and Anton Chekhov, a similar photographer, believed there was as much one could do with their characters — -like a photographer you click pictures and that’s that. A painter who goes on delicately constructing with a clear sense of a beginning, middle and an end, is not her.
This interview is a rare find considering how terrible we are at maintaining archives. If you have read Chughtai’s essay defending eroticism in literature you have more on that here. She debunks the patriarchal belief of “sharmo-haya” — -shyness — -as a women’s jewel, wondering why there should be different sets of jewellery for different sexes. Chughtai playfully admits to have admired beautiful men for their beauty, often attracting amazement and words of disbelief from fellow women who considered it culturally blasphemous.
There’s also much on her process of writing that involves lying on the bed surrounded by chaotic children and finishing her stories at a go, her habit of forgetting words and creating a single character from various people she “photographs”. There’s also a bit about the similarity between Manto and her writing, both preoccupied with seeing beauty in what the society considers ugly.
More in the longish Ismat Chughtai interview here: