The Rock - Ismat Chugtai

The Rock - Ismat Chugtai is a translation from Urdu by Tahira Naqvi

Points at a glance:

• Treats them like property
• patriarchy and the imagined necessity to control women
• Use and abuse
• Not a strong rock
• Literally domesticates women - complete transformation - cannot raise
• 'The body' - clear difference between male and female
• Women and transition
• Food as a metaphor for psyche of women
• Emotional eating
• Exerting rights
• Greater over wife
• Sister may do as she pleases - she has a voice, and agency - all women not treated the same
• Suppression of women with no direct violence shown
• Exposes injustice

Ismat Chughtai's story "The Rock" chronicles the transformation of two young, spirited brides into frumpy, docile housewives, each left in turn for younger, more svelte and more spirited women. The irony is that the husband and the female members of his family are responsible for the transformations, the first narrated in detail and the second merely implied, as they encouraged the first young bride to eat fattening foods and the husband insisted he "found her pleasing just the way she was, untidy and disheveled." We soon discover in Rajakumar's discussion of the story that his motive is not unconditional love but control, and once he achieves his goal, his subdued wife is discarded for another young woman who resembles the bride the current wife had once been. Particularly painful to read is how the household's female family members gleefully take part in this project.