In 1947, even as India began, in Nehru's famous words, a "tryst with destiny", the nation found itself overtaken by the cataclysmic event of partition. Partition of India was an event of tremendous ...social, political, religious, and ethical disruption with its accompanying acts of violence, horror, and savagery. Amidst that violence, a writer who dared to narrate stories of this overpowering insanity was the celebrated Saadat Hasan Manto. That he could write with adequate detachment, fairly and poignantly, and capture the passions in reasonable language, without taking sides and without getting trapped within the communal logic, is indeed, as unbelievable as was the terrible reality of the world around. Keeping his focus on the predicament of ordinary people caught in the chaos, Manto lays bare the sheer ugliness and bestiality lying dormant within the human psyche. His raw portrayals have kept the cries of victims and the mindlessness of it all alive through time. The paper takes account of five of Manto's short stories to examine how the narrative of disruption continues to overpower years after it actually happened. Keywords: Partition, Manto, Disruption, Violence.
Translation Section Sengupta, Samrat
Sanglap : journal of literary and cultural inquiry,
12/2021, Letnik:
8, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In the Urdu story "Yes Master" the childlike simplicity of Manto's language has been translated effectively by Asma Rafiq which relates to the protagonist Qasim - a ten year old boy serving as a ...domestic help in a household. The poem "How to Overcome a Bad Day" by the Malayali author Kala Sajeevan directs us towards another form of aphasia or speechlessness where the pain and discomfort of a woman can never be depicted, and a woman is always expected to be happy and beautiful. The image of darkness in the poem indicates the absence of representation of women's bad days, which are supposed to be covered by proper makeup, false self-decorations and feigned happiness.
The article attempts a comparative study of Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan and the select stories of Saadat Hasan Manto, written against the backdrop of the India-Pakistan partition of 1947 ...which traumatized and affected millions of people. The study looks into the fictitious nature of the brand-new identity taken up by people and the manner in which they acted under the influence of radical nationalism and extremism. It unravels the consequences of partition madness upon women and children as they became the easiest targets of the fanatics. It intends to identify the similarities and dissimilarities between both writers in respect of their portrayal of the refugee crisis, partition riots, communal madness as reflected in their works, and their reactions towards the religious division of India. The adopted method of this study is a comparative study in which textual analysis involving close reading of the select texts is utilized, taking postcolonialism and feminism into account. The analysis is further substantiated with the data taken from secondary sources. Keywords: Khushwant Singh, Saadat Hasan Manto, Partition of Indian subcontinent, Riots, Refugees, Communal madness, Comparative Study.
This essay reads Saadat Hasan Manto's short story, "Thanda Gosht" (1950), depicting women's experience of sectarian brutality during the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, to delineate the ...postcolonial significance Gayatri Spivak's concept of originary queerness. Manto's synecdoche ("cold meat") for an unnamed and raped female corpse, her Sikh abductor and violator, as well as for the story's readers, (re)figures reproductive heteronormativity as a process of unknowing that emplaces a gendered taxonomy, even when its victims are silent. Rather than reinforce sexual difference as a finished itinerary, however, Kulwant Kaur's repeatedly piercing question--who she is--queers "Thanda Gosht" by taking us to a "she" who we cannot imagine but seem to know. This tarrying with originary queerness "in its place" (Spivak, "Gender" 817, emphases added) dockets an unpredictable futurity made especially resonant by the chill that asseverates from Ishar's Singh's use of a peculiar affective idiom to describe his encounter with the unnamed and raped corpse, whose originary queerness inverts a teleological trajectory to manifest (the fight for) Nation as (visiting) "burre ki ma ka ghar" phrase omitted R; the house of Bad's mother). This place, far from patriarchal honor and protection, makes a "zaalim" ( bloodthirsty) of ("us") all, such that we cannot say what happened.
This article critically engages with Maya K Rao's Khol Do (Take It Off), as a dancetheatre performance of pain and empathy through which the notion of being and becoming is contested. This nonverbal ...performance, revolving around one of the stories written by Saadat Hasan Manto that is based on the atrocities occurred during the India-Pakistan partition, is about a man in search of her daughter, only to find her as a victim of gang-rape. The article examines Rao's conscious choice of portraying the role ofthe father to construct the performance ofpain/empathy, through her use ofembodied dance/theatre practice of kathakali. Building on the theoretical frameworks of Marla Carlson on empathy and Phillip Zarrilli on being-doing, the article attempts to understand how it displaces the empathy derived out of violated body of a woman and connects to contemporary debates on sexual violence by reinterpreting and inverting the kathakali codes. Raman Kumar is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. He is researching on the reception and role of state, market and civil society in the context of the works of the contemporary women directors in India. He completed his MPhilfrom Jawaharlal Nehru University with his dissertation titled "Gender Body Space--Exploring Aesthetics & Politics in the Works of the Select Contemporary Women Directors (Amal Allana, Anuradha Kapur, Maya K Rao, Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry)." His areas of interests include postcolonial theatre, embodied research, intermediality in theatre and theatre historiography.
This essay reads Saadat Hasan Manto s short story "Thanda Gosht" (1950), depicting womens experience of sectarian brutality during the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, to delineate the ...postcolonial significance Gayatri Spivaks concept of originary queerness. Mantos synecdoche ("cold meat") for an unnamed and raped female corpse, her Sikh abductor and violator, as well as for the story's readers, (re)figures reproductive heteronormativity as a process of unknowing that emplaces a gendered taxonomy, even when its victims are silent. Rather than reinforce sexual difference as a finished itinerary, however, Kulwant Kaurs repeatedly piercing question-who she is-queers "Thanda Gosht" by taking us to a "she" who we cannot imagine but seem to know. This tarrying with originary queerness "in its place" (Spivak, "Gender" 817, emphases added) dockets an unpredictable futurity made especially resonant by the chill that asseverates from Ishar s Singh's use of a peculiar affective idiom to describe his encounter with the unnamed and raped corpse, whose originary queerness inverts a teleological trajectory to manifest (the fight for) Nation as (visiting) "burre ki ma ka ghar" (... the house of Bad's mother). This place, far from patriarchal honor and protection, makes a "zaalim" (... bloodthirsty) of ("us") all, such that we cannot say what happened.
The paper studies how various shades of love respond to precarity in anarchic times by comparing the narrative representation of the aftermath of the Partition of the British colonized Subcontinent ...into independent countries of India and Pakistan in 1947 with particular focus on Sikh-Muslim relationships in Punjab as presented in Khushwant Singh's novel Train to Pakistan and Saadat Hasan Manto's short story "Gurmukh Singh ki Wasiyat." Employing Judith Butler's concept of precarity, the paper analyzes how both the writers sketch precarity in partition times ensuing in post-Partition communal violence and effacement of love. The selection of the texts is significant because Singh presents precarity in the multi-ethnic village of Mano Majra whereas Manto presents the city of Amritsar on fire, thus encompassing rural and urban life. Both the texts gradually unleash how the love between communities fades away precipitated by the increasing violence while personal love unflinchingly last even during the times of anarchy, irrespective of communal and religious differences. Jugga who is a Sikh by ethnicity sacrifices his life for his Muslim beloved Nooran and Gurmukh Sing assigns the responsibility of his unflinching gratitude for Mr Abdul Hayee to his son after his death. Whereas before the Partition personal and communal commitments were equally strong, the divergence takes place between the two due to the precarity after Partition that rifts communities apart but personal love remains resilient to socio-political pressures.
Roger McNamara's Secularism and the Crisis of Minority Identity in Postcolonial Literature is situated within the contentious relationships and violent outbursts that occur between different ethnic ...and religious minorities and the Hindu majority in postcolonial India. Through a reading of the historical and political tensions in 1980s India, McNamara judiciously reviews the critical doubts about national secularism and its "endorsements of the cultural values of upper-caste Hindu men" (34). McNamara's keen close reading of the selected literary works unveils minority groups' resistance to the widely circulated and imported European "elitism" that has dominated the political, religious, and cultural scenes in postcolonial India and Sri Lanka.
This is the story of how G. A. Naqvi (Indian Police, 1926) of the United Province (UP) was affected by the events of 1947–1948 in British and independent India and Pakistan and had to become what he ...did not wish to be: a private citizen in Pakistan. It shows how he, like so many others, had to become reconciled to the idea of British India breaking-up into independent India and Pakistan. This process changed forever the relationship between institutions of the Indian State and individual lives of Indian Muslims; the ‘long’ Partition of British India prompted new questions of legitimacy, citizenship and sovereignty, while producing “displacement, disruption and disappointment”. This was especially so in the so-called ‘Muslim-minority provinces’, among which the UP held the pre-eminent position and to which Naqvi belonged. After 21 ½ years of service, Naqvi found himself unwanted in both India and Pakistan, in a time of deepening communal divide, suspicion and hostility. A much sought-after officer during the Second World War, how was he to know that over 1947–1948, not one of the four governments to which he was and/or could be affiliated with would want to have anything to do with him.
