Guldaan – گُل دان

Thank you Parhai Likhai for sending me this beautiful book! I’m having a great reading and couldn’t more thankful to you for it. Without further ado, here’s my review of the stories I’ve read so far from the collection:

Sometimes you pick up a book and the material it has to offer you makes you realise that you were totally meant to read this book at this time and that at no other time would it have made more sense. This is what happened to me when I started reading this book, Guldaan by Ismat Chugtai. I was already reading A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf and Sexual Politics by Kate Millet, both of which are highly renowned authors in the feminist tradition, when I decided to dig into this one. And precisely because I was reading just the very best kind of feminist literature that ever was produced in the history of mankind (and that of womankind of course!), I was in a better position to gauge the worth, so to speak, of this well-celebrated feminist writer of the Subcontinent. And trust me when I say that that she isn’t called one of the best Urdu writers, feminist and otherwise, for no reason. I’ll shed some light on that in the following paragraphs.

Guldaan is a collection of short stories and essays by the author. And as I read one story after another in the collection, I could myself being immersed in the awe of what I was reading. Story after story made me realise that Chugtai talks about things in her fiction that Woolf and Millet have penned down in the form of literary theory. And I’m not saying that she has just blindly copied whatever Western feminists have already. On the contrary, her work seems so original because it is highly rooted in geographical and historical context that it emerges from. It’s just that genius has a way of being similar no matter where it is spotted, and that is what I mean when I say that these three women writers’ works have something strikingly common among them.
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The first story that I read from the book was “Zehar Ka Piyala”. It is about a young mother who belongs to a very poor social class and has to work as a little girl’s nurse at a rich house in order to make ends meet. The tragedy here is that because she spends all her time nursing and taking care of the little rich girl, she has no milk or time left to give her own son who’s also only a toddler. As the time passes the rich girl grows fatter and fatter on the love and nutrition given to her by the poor maid, while her son grows weak and ill due to malnutrition. Things keep on going this way until the child dies of sickness. The “pilyala” or a kind of cup mentioned in the title is significant here as it is the only source of consolation that exists there for the poor little poor, the only thing that he can bite onto while he is being gradually starved to death. This tale broke my heart so badly and I felt so sorry for the countless such little boys and girls who suffer this fate because their mothers are whisked away from them or are other unable to feed properly because of poverty. It is a powerful tale, one which will stay with me for a long time.
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“Nwala” or “Morsel” is a story about a middle-aged lady health health worker who is still unmarried and therefore thought of as a burden on the face of the earth. This woman has many admires but has never considered anyone seriously enough to think about actually getting married. She earns her own money, lives independently and is very popular within her community, yet she is still thought of as incomplete. This story is a comment on the convoluted ideas of our society when it comes to designating women their worth. Chugtai uses the metaphor of the “morsel” for women because she believes that that is the only status reserved for women in our society. They are looked at as commodities to be consumed by the men and nothing else. And in order to make it look more appealing, so many different chutnies and pickles of make up and jewellery are added to the plain morsel as if the morsel itself has no worth.
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“Cheeni ki Gurya”: This one is actually an essay and it discusses how it is important for actresses to work on their acting skills instead of relying on their beauty and looks. This one and also “Devta” made me realise how involved Chugtai was with the film industry and knew the absolute nitty-gritty of it. I haven’t read her biography yet but I’m pretty sure she had deep relations with the industry in Bombay. Anyway, this essay discusses how the status of the female actor has gradually diminished in the films from being the very focus of attention to the mere margins. She contributes this dilemma to actresses paying too much attention their external beauty than trying to improve their craft. She believes that the actresses of the time are too busy copying each others’ hairstyles and make-up techniques that they have demoted themselves to the status of mere objects. She thinks it the women in the industry themselves who are responsible for this sort of trend, and it is something that needs to be amended by them in order to actually regain their previous, much grander roles in the films.
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“Dhoksla” is a short story comments on the worsening state of educational affairs in the country. Chugtai notes how it is the degrees that are important for the rich students that frequent these big colleges in India, and that how these students are very much aware of the security of their social status. This sense of security leads them to treat these educational institutions as degree-making machines and the teachers there as mere observers and sometimes even collaborators in the process of achieving these degrees in all the wrong ways. She comments on how cheating during examination is rampant, and if a teacher is so stupid as to object to it, they are instantly threatened and removed from the teachinh position for being a hurdle in the paths of these privileged students. Mostly, she believes, these teachers are complicit in making sure that this whole cheating enterprise runs smoothly and are indefinitely rewarded by the parents of the rich kids as well. Reading this essay made me realise how corruption has seeped into every single institution of our society and that is probably responsible for where we stand as a society today.

Stay tuned for the next parts of the review as well!