The (Male) Gaze of Shadows : The Inner Lives of Women in Works of Ismat Chughtai and Amrita Sher-Gil

In the 1930s-40s, the rhetoric of the colonialists and the Indian nationalists sounded similar, as each group’s modernizing mission viewed women as objects of desire and protection. How did Ismat Chughtai’s Urdu short stories and Amrita Sher-Gil’s paintings respond to this dominant patriarchal discourse? Critics have often read their overlapping explorations of women’s inner lives as ‘subverting’ the ‘male gaze.’ But considering the realist locations of their works are spaces of hetero-patriarchal imagination, where does the audience’s gaze turn? Is the subversion successful? This article analyzes Chughtai’s ‘Lihaaf’ and Sher-Gil’s paintings, ‘Women Resting on a Charpoy’ and ‘Self-Portrait as a Tahitian,’ focusing on the domestic sphere. They reveal the oppressiveness of these spaces while compelling the audience to confront how its inhabitants assert their desires and selfhood. Foucault’s ‘heterotopia,’ closed spaces to contain disruptive ‘Others,’ is a useful lens to understand the patriarchal design of the domestic sphere. By reading the visual and literary imagery of shadows in these works, this article examines the tension between the perpetuation of the male gaze and its internalization by women to argue that Chughtai and Sher-Gil do not wholly subvert the male gaze but bring the audience to a place of uneasy acknowledgement.