Author(s): Ananya

Abstract: Ismat Chughtai’s fiction engages the body as a deeply political and spiritual site, where desire, silence, and moral regulation intersect. This paper examines how Chughtai represents same-sex female intimacy not as moral collapse but as an alternative form of emotional and spiritual truth. Focusing primarily on Lihaaf and selected short stories, the study explores how queer desire, though socially coded as sin, becomes a source of comfort, care, and existential survival for women confined within patriarchal and religious respectability. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s understanding of sexuality as a discourse of power and Sara Ahmed’s work on affect and orientation, the paper argues that Chughtai subtly relocates spirituality from institutional religion to lived intimacy. While heteronormative morality denies queer bodies spiritual legitimacy, Chughtai’s narratives suggest that desire itself functions as a form of inward faith, a quiet commitment to emotional honesty. Spirituality, therefore, is not abandoned but transformed. Situated in the turbulent context of late-colonial India and Partition, Chughtai’s writing anticipates contemporary queer literary concerns by showing how private desire becomes a refuge from social, political, and moral violence. Her restrained narrative style, marked by suggestion, irony, and silence, allows queer embodiment to exist without moral spectacle. A brief comparative reading of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater demonstrates how contemporary queer writers continue this redefinition of spirituality beyond religious doctrine. Read together, they reveal a queer literary tradition in which desire is not opposed to spirituality, but

Keywords: Corporeal Studies, Desire and Spirituality, Ismat Chughtai, Narrative Studies, Queer Embodiment.

Article Info: Received: 15 Apr 2026; Received in revised form: 13 May 2026; Accepted: 17 May 2026; Available online: 21 May 2026

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.113.24