Eating Her Way through Crisis: Eating as an act of Defiance in Ismat Chughtai’s The Rock

Abstract

Ismat Chughtai, an iconoclast, throughout her writing career has examined the various modes of patriarchal oppressions that engulfed the lives of women. An ardent critique of the institution of marriage that deprives women of their agency, Chughtai has used her mighty pen to give  voice to the pangs of anguish that has remained silent since time unknown. Arguing against the traditional mode of writings which merely reflects the lives of women, Chughtai, in her writings explores “the gestures of defiance or subversion implicit in [the lives of women]”  (Tharu & Lalitha 35). The present paper is  close reading of one such narrative of defiance – The Rock. The present paper will do a textual analysis of the short story and discuss how the  act of eating, to be more precise, overeating can be interpreted as an act of defiance against patriarchy. The paper will discuss how the patriarchal body politics has subjected female bodies  to corporeal disfigurement and the women, in their turn, have resisted the ideologies of the larger social bodies.