Broken Selves: Identifying Relativity in Lihaaf and Jaadein

Abstract

The Partition of British India into Pakistan and India is one of the most heinous manifestations of humanity on the subcontinent. Women suffered the most in the name of vengeance against another community or nation which led to Social Inclusion that is the denial of rights. The revelation of the relativity of reality is too just and crudely honest that more often than not, the act of realizing such subtleties becomes deliberately incomprehensible to the quotidian human being. Such ambivalence in perspective, circumstance, conventions, and binaries, surfaces through the common denominator, which is time. This study explores the relativity in the times of partition, affirming the statement by the assimilation of two of the works of Ismat Chughtai, pre-partition to modernity, "Lihaaf" and "Jadein" , highlighting the prerequisites for femininity in the pre-partition times, and cognizing the taboo, to the tolerable, finally to the approved. Furthermore, the segregation of women and society by différance has made deconstruction theory viable in analysis. It was a bewildering time where one’s loss of motherland, their kin, and their identity surmised into this perpetual state of disarray that dominated the post-partition minds.