The article freely continues the article on Premcand and the West, published in NO 3/2008. In the literature of the last several decades, Premcand’s warning appears again and again that though West offers personal freedom of choice and good economic conditions, life there is not as easy and as beautiful as it appears when one observes it from India, beset by local problems and difficulties. Of course, it is modified with course of time and elaborated minutely. There appear motifs that could not have been employed by Premcand because the problems in question did not exist on such a large scale in his time and because, unlike Premcand, contemporary writers have had many opportunities to acquire personal experience of life abroad and to observe at close quarters the variety of intricate situations, those which Premcand could only imagine.
Ismat Cuġtāī, successor to the first Urdū woman writer Raśīd Jahān, gave most of her literary attention to the middle-class Muslim family, in particular to the women within its strata. Thanks to her extensive and in some cases controversial literary work, she is fully recognized as one of the four pillars of the modern Urdū short story.