Censorship, “Obscenity” and Courtroom Drama: Reading Ismat Chughtai’s “Lihaaf” and “The ‘Lihaaf’ Trial”

Abstract

This essay examines the role of literature in exposing the entanglement of law, nationalism, and gender in British India and in shaping discourses about “obscenity” in literature. To this end, it analyzes Ismat Chughtai’s “Lihaaf,” a short story about same-sex female relationships for which she was put on trial in the Lahore High Court in 1944, and Chughtai’s own account of the “obscenity” trial. Chughtai’s description of the court proceedings enables a complicated understanding of how expectations about women’s appropriate roles and behaviour pervaded courtroom discussions to facilitate alliances and complicities among local and colonial power groups. Such alliances expose the paradoxical underpinnings of regulatory controls over literature and show that attempts to censor “Lihaaf” ultimately served the interests of a masculine nationalism that imagined the nation’s women as “good” wives. Read together with “Lihaaf,” her account of the trial shows that while nationalism allowed room for transgressive masculinities, the space of transgressive femininity, especially for middle-class women, remained limited. Additionally, it shows how the centrality of the middle-class woman’s question in the courtroom overrode attention to the complicated power relationships that play out across class, gender, and children in “Lihaaf.”