Google doodle celebrates 107th birth anniversary of Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai

Eminent Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai’s 107^th birthday was celebrated by popular search engine Google, on Tuesday. “The grande dame of Urdu fiction would have been 107 today,” wrote Google in a blog post while explaining the doodle.

From an overt assessment of her early work, she was described as being courageous and straightforward but her reputation has been defined by her work- ‘Lihaaf’ (The Quilt), which was written in 1942. A characteristic of her writing was the bold depiction of scandals, gossip, feuds and families stuffed into small houses in Uttar Pradesh, during the first half of the twentieth century.

Lihaaf was published at the dawn of Chughtai’ s career and was based on a rumour about an Aligarh begum having an affair with a female domestic help. Chughtai, who was the ninth of the ten children in the family was guided by Azim Beg Chughtai, who was a short story writer and her second-oldest sibling.

Her writings attempt to capture the lives and sorrow of her characters, who were mainly women, in an unmediated fashion. Her dialogues found form in, ‘ begamati zuban’– a form of Urdu which is termed as boorish and unpolished and was mainly spoken by the women in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.

A striking feature of her work was that it featured realistic, challenging women. Chughtai was awarded the prestigious Padma Shri in  1976 by the Indian government, which recognised her achievements in her literary career and fearless faith in her beliefs.

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