The Crooked Line

"This account of growing up in 1940s at the high point of anti-colonial struggles draws a crooked line across received notions of nationalist politics, Muslim family life, and colonial education. Questions of sexuality—and of Islam, India, growing up female—appear in unexpected new formations in this setting. Chughtai has given us one of the most richly textured and original of partition novels." —Susie Tharu, coeditor of Women Writing in India

"This passionate, often searing novel has the tactile force of a great sculpture: what we think of as the inferiority of the self and the otherness of the world are brought together in torque after torque of perception and dream, revealing the growth of a woman, her desire, her rage, her sexual longing in a crowded world, in a time filled with tumultuous historical change. In The Crooked Line, Ismat Chughtai has given us a masterwork." —Meena Alexander, author of Fault Lines: A Memoir

"Long before feminism and Simone de Beauvoir were available to women writers here, Ismat Chughtai had her finger on the pulse of a changing cosmos." —Outlook (India)