English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Ismat Chughtai was an Urdu-language writer in India whose affiliation with the Progressive Writers Movement sparked a lifelong tryst with socialism. This article examines the “material agency” found in household objects that help to co-create a society for women within their private gendered domains in which they hold power. The quilt and the diary – objects in Chughtai’s short stories “The Quilt” and “Chhoti Apa” respectively – serve as biographical insight into the women’s lives because they create a subjectivity that was previously denied to Muslim women by oriental ethnographic studies. The agency of the objects lies in their ability to morph their meaning according to contexts, revealing the socially constructed nature of identity of humans and objects, forged by wrestling with variables such as gender and sexuality. Chughtai’s stories “unveil” Muslim women’s daily performative acts of resistance in a decolonial discourse on material culture and postcolonial feminism.

Object as subject: Material agency in Ismat Chughtai’s “The Quilt” and “Chhoti Apa”