Ismat Chughtai

Chughtai was one of ten children in a Muslim family in Uttar Pradesh, and fought her family for the right to attend college and university at a time when few Muslim women in India did either, eventually training as a teacher. She joined the Progressive Writers' Movement, a circle of leftist Urdu writers pushing fiction toward social realism, and married the filmmaker Shahid Latif.

Her 1942 story 'Lihaaf' ('The Quilt'), narrated by a child glimpsing her aunt's affair with a female servant through shadows on a quilt, drew an obscenity charge from the colonial courts in Lahore; Chughtai fought the case rather than apologize and was acquitted. She kept writing fiction, screenplays, and memoir across five decades, unflinching about desire, hypocrisy, and the constraints on women's lives.

She died in Bombay in 1991, having willed that her body be cremated rather than buried, a final refusal of convention.