The Heart Breaks Free & the Wild One

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 where such a relationship can only be a horror and a tragedy unless it is conducted in secret and quickly forgotten. Yet, 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 was born in 1915 in Badayun and is counted among the earliest and foremost women Urdu writers. She focused on women’s issues with a directness and intensity unparalleled in Urdu literature among writers of her generation. She is the author of several collections of short stories, novellas, a novel, Terhi Lakir (The Crooked Line), a collection of reminiscences and essays, My Friend, My Enemy, and a memoir, Kaghazi Hai Perahan (The Paper-thin Garment). With her husband, Shahid Latif, a film director, she produced and co-directed six films, and produced a further six, independently, after his death. Tahira Naqvi, a translator of Urdu fiction and prose, taught English for twenty years, and has taught Urdu at Columbia University, and now heads the Urdu programme at New York University. She has translated Ismat Chughtai’s short stories, her novel and her essays. She has also translated the works of Khadija Mastur, Sa’dat Hasan Manto and Munshi Premchand. Naqvi also writes fiction in English. She has published two collections of short fiction, Attar of Roses and Other Stories of Pakistan and Dying in a Strange Country. Her short stories have been widely anthologized.