Portrayal of Sexuality and Women’s Agency in Ismat Chughtai’s Lihaaf
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ismat Chughati’s short story Lihaaf navigates the complexities of sexuality. It is an intriguing story that unfurls a lesbian relationship, portraying the unprocessed longing of the protagonist. Despite Begum’s wish for a harmonious married relationship with Nawab, his incapacitation and the conundrums of monotony within that one room led her to channel her emotions toward Rabbu. The overarching point of this study is how the author inextricably links sexuality with the experiences of these two women, portraying the impositions of societal norms. Sexuality and woman’s agency is contextualized within the narrative of Chughtai's Lihaaf. The quilt becomes an object of resistance to the heteropatriarchal structure, while zenana is that gendered space where she resists societal constraints. Consequently, she was embroiled in controversy, laden with unsubstantiated accusations of presenting an exaggerated perspective on sexuality. While Chughtai dealt with accusations, she refused to go by conventional classification systems. This paper attempts to discuss how Chughtai locates female desire within the subjugation of women and roles demarcated by heterosexuality. Her authorial intention was to challenge the established norms of a male-dominated society, and to highlight the conventional binary labels and prejudices that reinforce stereotypes regarding the lesbian experience. The researcher aims to delineate the subject of female sexuality and patriarchal conventions in Lihaaf.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".