The (Male) Gaze of Shadows: The Inner Lives of Women in the Works of Ismat Chughtai and Amrita Sher-Gil
Article Abstract
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
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This article was written for the ‘Feminist Mappings: Art, Literature and Films’ 2026 issue of Indraprasth: An International Journal of Culture & Communication Studies (ISSN 2278-7208), a peer-reviewed, annual scholarly journal published by the University School of Humanities and Social Sciences (USHSS) at Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University/
