The persistence of human perfidy

Recommending Mirza Azeem Baig Chughtai’s Urdu novel, Vampire, in the 21st century needs to come with a trigger warning. As an account of sexual assault and its aftermath, it is a visceral and stomach-churning story, accused of obscenity at the time of its appearance in 1932, its controversial premise leading to its author being showered with death threats by irate fellow Muslims. Yet, cutting through the miasma of moral outrage, Vampire remains a sobering reminder of the persistence of human perfidy—an unchanging, ever-present poison—in the world we have inherited, live in and are leaving behind.

Translated sensitively and with impeccable control by Zoovia Hamiduddin, Chughtai’s granddaughter, Vampire has been recently published in English by Speaking Tiger. This slim novel, narrated by a 16-year-old girl, is very much product of its time, but shakes the reader to the core close to a century later. The protagonist, who has been married off at a tender age, is yet to move into her husband’s home. Until he finishes his training in the police force, she must bide her time at her parental abode. She remembers nothing of her husband from the nikah ceremony but, like most young girls of her age, has her head full of fantasies about a tall, dark, handsome stranger with whom she is going to spend the rest of her life happily ever after.

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Destiny has other plans. On the way to a family wedding, she falls asleep on the train, misses her stop, and lands up in the arms of the devil incarnate. In the depths of the night, led by a “jamadar” to a supposedly safe Muslim house, she is raped by a youth: “He was fair-skinned, with good features, a wide forehead, and large, exceptionally bright eyes.” In the prolonged scene of violence-laced seduction that precedes the act, she is terrified, helpless, and pushed to the edge to articulate the unspeakable. “I was thinking that if I wasn’t already married, I would have made a compromise and accepted this savage beast.”

One of Chughtai’s many gifts as a writer is his ventriloquism. It’s hardly surprising that he has been called the first feminist Urdu writer, though that epithet has been now reclaimed by his glitteringly brilliant sister, Ismat Chughtai. As Hamiduddin writes in her translator’s note, “Chughtai’s greatest talent was to be able to enter the dark recesses in the minds of his female characters and voice the thoughts from within so perfectly that readers were convinced the story had been narrated to him by a woman.” In Vampire, he inhabits his protagonist’s consciousness with such fidelity that it feels as though he is possessed by her spirit—the depths of her despair, abjection, and shattered self speak through him in every sentence of the novel.

Long before “rape trauma syndrome” was identified as a condition in the 1970s, Chughtai had delved into its nefarious roots and horrendous reality in novels like Vampire. In spite of the grievous attack on her mind and body, his protagonist is wracked with guilt for bringing shame and dishonour on her filial and marital families. Oscillating between her Stockholm Syndrome of wanting to confront her tormentor and forcing him to marry her and flagellating herself for her “crime”, she embodies some of the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. At the same time, there is something much larger at play. The story is as much a comment on the female psyche, as on the mindset of a society where women are treated as inferior beings from birth.

Once again, through her sharp reading, Hamiduddin points the reader to the reality of conservative Muslim families at the turn of the century, especially the status of women in the community. In the larger scheme of the novel, victim and perpetrator both turn into symbols of the festering values that lie behind this state of putrefaction. Indeed, the fact that Chughtai chose the word “vampire” for the title is in itself significant. “‘Vampire’ is an English word and I admit I have committed a theft,” as he writes in the preface. “Let me assure you that the Urdu language needs the word.”

Lexically, the word “vampire” remains inextricably linked with Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It pollutes the very air that flows through the world of the eponymous count of Transylvania and his deviously sexualised cult of gothic horror. In Chughtai’s novel, however, the word plays a metaphorical role by correlating the survivor of rape with the undead, who inhabit the world in a bubble of agony.

Like the victims of Dracula’s bloodlust, the protagonist of Vampire is thrust into a living hell by her assaulter and left to fight the slings and arrows of fortune in this state of perpetual torment. Such is the shame of her “dishonour” that it pushes her father to attempt suicide, “for what is a man without honour?” As the “flag bearer” of this “honour”, the protagonist is pushed into the jaws of death by her parents, for it is better to “lose your life before your honour.” Even as she concurs with this fate, her 16-year-old self emerges from time to time, afraid of the end, not wanting to die even before her life had even begun.

Chughtai’s nuanced exploration of his protagonist’s painful dilemma comes through in every line, but what’s truly pathbreaking is his unsparing criticism of Muslim society. As Hamiduddin writes, “Chughtai is pointing out that this soul-sucking fiend has been given birth, and is being nurtured, by conservative Muslim society.” In an even more daring move, he compares the violation of the young girl to the storming of the Karbala, which created a rift within Islam that is yet to heal to this day.

Born in 1898, Chughtai was far ahead of his time in his thinking about the role of women in society. It isn’t surprising that he faced the intolerance of his contemporaries for his satires during his short life of 41 years. But what’s truly alarming is the progress India, as a society, has made since his time.

In 2024, we are still living in a country where, according to data available from 2021, 86 women report cases of rape every day—the actual number could be higher, considering most cases remain unreported. Accusers continue to get a wide berth because of judicial delays and lapses—or simply because of the patriarchal privilege of being born in the right class, caste, and religion. Think of the young scion of a powerful political family in Karnataka making news for allegedly being a serial sex offender at the moment.

It will be tempting for some to read Chughtai’s novel as an excuse to point fingers at one community and its failings to treat women with dignity. But the reality is his story highlights a condition that is much more chronic and widespread across communal, religious and every other divide in society.

Somak Ghoshal is a writer based in Delhi.

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