Read an Excerpt
Beyond Partition
Gender, Violence, and Representation in Postcolonial India
By Deepti Misri UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2014 the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-08039-5
CHAPTER 1
Anatomy of a Riot
Vulnerable Male Bodies in Manto and Other Fictions
When the neighbourhood was set on fire, everything burnt down with the exception of one shop and its sign.
It said, "All building and construction materials sold here."
—Saadat Hasan Manto, "Daawat e amal" (Invitation to Action), Mottled Dawn
The two-line vignette above first appeared in 1948 in Black Marginalia (Siyah Haashiye), a slim volume of thirty-two literary sketches penned by the well-known Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto. Written even as the fires of Partition still burned, the sketches in Black Marginalia unwaveringly profiled the looting, arson, murder, religious defilement, and sexual violence that marked the violence of 1947, the double-edged moment of the Partition and Independence of India and Pakistan. In "Invitation to Action," the lone shop and its inviting sign may be read as embodying the ironic promise of the new nation-state—the only standing structure in the midst of utter demolition, offering materials for reconstruction to absent buyers dispossessed of all the purchases they might once have had in the world. As such, the sign appears as a taunt, a bogus "invitation to action," the wryly mocking title drawing from the reader the cheerless laugh that resounds throughout the collection, as sketch after sketch dramatizes the cosmic irony of a bloody Partition that had been proposed as a solution to communal tensions.
In this chapter I want to consider the violence of the communal riot—that staple form of postcolonial violence so deeply imbricated with ideas of India —through an exploration of Manto's post-Partition opus. I approach Manto's Partition writings with a special focus on the sketches in Black Marginalia, which puzzlingly remain underexamined in critical scholarship on Manto despite being widely recognized as among the most scathing literary critiques of communal violence even to date. Given Manto's stature as the "enfant terrible" of Urdu literature and the ideological work his fiction is so frequently made to perform in the contemporary secular critique of communal violence in India, it seems that any cultural exploration of communal violence in India must inevitably return to this fabled literary figure, whose acerbic persona and writings form the subject of countless news features, academic theses, theatrical adaptations, and translations in India today. Furthermore, in the vast archive of Partition writing, Manto's fiction offers a rare representation of the riot that focuses on the male perpetrator, as well as an unusual fictional exploration of the gendered vulnerability of male bodies in the communal riot. I begin by reading Manto's fiction for the brilliant insights it provides about the form and contradictions of communal violence, but I wish here to draw attention also to the limits of his critical vision, particularly the brand of secularism promoted in his fiction. I question in particular Manto's dismissal of all investment in embodied religious markers and his singling out of the Sikh male figure as representative of what he saw as a puerile investment in embodied practices, such as the strict maintenance of uncut hair or the commitment to wearing the turban, sometimes at cost to one's own life. In Manto's defense it might be said that he was writing in a moment of transition where it was perhaps less clear what position the Sikh minority would eventually come to be assigned in a putatively secular postcolonial India (although Sikh leaders of the time fully anticipated this future). Regardless, contemporary readers of Manto must ask whether this is an attitude we can afford to inherit, particularly in the aftermath of the anti-Sikh violence of 1984. In that year, Hindu mobs, in violence orchestrated by political leaders following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, hunted down Sikh civilians and subjected Sikh men in particular to ritual forms of violence, central among which was the deturbanning and cutting of Sikh men's hair before burning the victims to death or killing them in other ways. Toward the end of this chapter, I offer some post-1984 fictional accounts that provide more complex representations than Manto's of the violence of "painless" practices such as the deturbanning and cutting of hair of Sikh men, either forced upon them as a gesture of "conversion" or undertaken by them in order to pass as non-Sikh. These latter fictions, I suggest, might provide a more productive path for an accommodation of minority citizenship in India. They also offer a way of reading Manto via a critical apparatus endorsed by Priyamvada Gopal, one "that evades both the celebratory and the condemnatory," in line with Manto's own wishes that he not be posthumously deified (Gopal 2005, 122).
"A Story of Blood and Fire"
I'm at a loss about what to do with Manto's Siyah Haashiye: should I catalogue it as a work of literature or should I find an entirely new classification for it? Manto is very fond of things that create an uproar and awaken with a start even those who are fast asleep....
Usually this tactic pays off, and Manto has managed to receive a lot of applause, but the arrow has missed its mark this time. Siyah Haashiye is neither a masterpiece nor a timeless marvel, but it's not garbage either.
—Ismat Chughtai, "Communal Violence and Literature"
Black Marginalia was published in Pakistan in October 1948 after several months of creative inertia on the part of Manto following Partition, his dislocation from his beloved city of Bombay, and his move to Lahore. The volume, comprising his first effort at writing after his move to Pakistan, was not well received upon its publication: the critic Leslie Flemming writes that it went "virtually unnoticed," but by Manto's own account the collection suffered from too much unfavorable notice. By the time the volume appeared, Manto, while at the height of his career, had been at odds both with the British government, which had repeatedly charged him with obscenity, and with some members of the leftist Progressive Writers Association (PWA), a group of radical writers with whom Manto had broadly aligned himself despite his always-uneasy relationship with the Progressive movement. In an essay written in 1951, Manto complained to his readers of the harsh criticism Black Marginalia had received at the hands of some members of the PWA: "Believe me, it caused me great pain when some of my literary friends made cruel fun of my book, denouncing me as an irresponsible carrier of tales, a jokester, a nuisance, a cynic and a reactionary. One of them, a close friend, accused me of having robbed the dead of their possessions to build a collection" (qtd. in Hasan 1991, xii).
Despite this uncharitable reception during its own time, the collection has since gained favor with publishers, readers, and critics—at least in piecemeal form, if not in its entirety. Widely excerpted, Manto's Partition vignettes have recently become quite popular, appearing in multiple anthologies of Partition writing as well as in news magazines. The vignettes' late popularity may be partly explained by the renewed interest in Partition writing, scholarship, and translation around the time of India's and Pakistan's fiftieth Independence Day celebrations in 1997. Manto's centennial in 2012 also inspired another outpouring of reprints, public readings, and theatrical productions of his work, as well as a host of news stories on this beloved and controversial writer. As well, the vignettes' appeal is possibly due to their brevity and apparent ease of reading: a selection of a few of these sketches coupled with some details from Manto's brief, controversial, and tumultuous life usually makes for very readable copy. Whether the sketches themselves are as easily decipherable as they are readable is another matter altogether: their pithy form belies the heavy interpretive burden that Manto lays upon his reader, demanding a close reading to unravel their complexity.
Notwithstanding the apparent resurgence and recirculation of Manto's vignettes, Black Marginalia has received scant attention as a separate corpus within Manto criticism in English. Although the sketches are frequently discussed in critical analyses of Manto's Partition writing in general, there exists little exhaustive analysis on the volume in its entirety. For instance, in his essay "Dance of Grotesque Masks," Alok Bhalla groups Black Marginalia along with "Cold Meat" and "Open It" in Manto's first set of stories about Partition, setting these "chronicles of the damned" apart from Manto's post-1951 Partition stories (175). While this is a plausible grouping, Bhalla does not attend to the differences that exist within this first group of writings as well: whereas Black Marginalia may well be examined among the rest of Manto's powerful post-Partition oeuvre, the distinctive formal attributes of this collection set it apart from the rest of Manto's short fiction before and after 1947 and thereby deserve separate critical scrutiny. Why did Manto find this fragmentary form to be a particularly apposite to depicting the violence of Partition? What was the social text that these Black Marginalia attempted to annotate? Are the vignettes best understood as documentary, denunciatory, or didactic pieces?
It is generally suggested that Manto's Black Marginalia and indeed much of his early Partition writing in general took a form appropriate to his first shocked reactions to the Partition. In many ways this fragmentary form speaks to the problem of representing violence in its immediate aftermath. The vignettes are often read as "first reaction" pieces, and it is argued that in his later Partition fiction, Manto turns to more conventional/coherent narrative forms to explore Partition. For instance, Leslie Flemming maps the shift in Manto's post-Partition fiction in the following way:
[I]n his first shocked reaction to the brutalities of the riots, the only way Manto could deal with such events was to divest them of all possible emotion and laugh at them as intellectual jokes. These anecdotes are clever and foreshadow later sarcasm, but they also show that Manto had yet to deal realistically with the human emotions and difficulties engendered by the upheaval of Partition. In later stories, which deal more concretely with Partition, he would show not only that he had no more need of this kind of verbal irony or punning, but also that he could approach, sometimes with sarcasm, sometimes with anger, occasionally even with compassion, a more realistic description of Partition." (74–75, emphasis added)
Here, Flemming reads the anecdotal form and ironic content of the Marginalia as purely symptomatic of a need for emotional distance on the part of the author from the "reality" of Partition. It is certainly possible to understand the vignettes as being shaped to some extent by the trauma of Partition, but Flemming seems to read them as evincing a certain escapism: an inability to measure up to the task of realistic description (which she finds Manto was eventually able to achieve in his later fiction) and thereby from the reality of Partition itself. In my reading, however, the condensed vignettes represent some of Manto's most well-crafted work, not mere reaction pieces. Rather than facilitating an escape from the reality of Partition, the brilliant irony of these sketches, combined with their sparse (or perhaps even anti-) narration, effects in fact a different mode of engagement with that reality on the part of the writer as well as the reader.
It may be instructive to here turn to Manto's own reasoning for writing the Black Marginalia. The vignette's curtness of form seems to embody the urgency of its purpose in a moment directly following the brutal violence of Partition. Manto was not at this point interested in historical explanation, as was clear from his grouse that those seeking to explain Partition insisted on "looking for the truth" by peeling the onion of history:
Some said if you were looking for the truth, you would have to go back to the ruins of the 1857 Mutiny. Others said, no, it all lay in the history of the East India Company. Some went back even further and advised you to analyze the Mughal Empire. Everybody wanted to drag you back into the past, while murderers and terrorists marched on unchallenged, writing in the process a story of blood and fire which had no parallel in history. (Qtd. in Hasan 1989, 6)
Rather than speculate, as did his contemporaries, on causes and historical antecedents, Manto would instead turn his attention to the "story of blood and fire" being written by "murderers and terrorists" at the heart of the communal riot. If violence was an unchallenged story of blood and fire, then he was going to retell that story in his fiction. He would do this not by telling another story but by providing his marginal annotations—readings, as it were—to that story of violence. These would be the plotless marginalia that would elude the narrative grasp of history and thereby deny to violence the sense-making structures of historical explanation. In other words, in rewriting the story of blood and fire, Manto sought to intervene in and reshape contemporary accounts of the Partition, attending to the immediate horror of the event and deflecting attention from the origins as well as the effects of violence by focusing squarely on the present.
In doing so, Manto appears, in fact, to have somewhat anticipated historian Gyan Pandey's problematization of the form typically taken by historical narratives of violence, and particularly of the consequences of narrativizing violence in the longue durée. In his essay "In Defense of the Fragment," Pandey writes:
[T]he grand narratives we produce—and must continue to produce—as historians, political scientists, sociologists, or whatever—tend to be about "context" alone, or at least primarily: the "larger forces" of history that assemble to produce violent conflicts.... One advantage, or ... consequence, of such narrativizing is that we are able to escape the problem of representing pain. This is a sanitized history with which we are relatively comfortable. In it, violence, suffering, and many of the scars left by their history are suppressed.
It seems to me imperative, however, that historians and social scientists pay closer attention to the moment of violence and try in some way to represent it in their writings. There are at least two reasons for this. First, the moment of violence, and suffering, tells us a great deal about our condition today. Secondly, the experience of violence is in crucial ways constitutive of our "traditions," our sense of community, our communities, and our history. (41)
The condensed form of Manto's vignette embodies a similar preoccupation with the present rather than the historical trajectory of violence. But although Manto was interested in representing the moment of violence, he was not particularly interested in a restoration of pain, suffering, and trauma. In contrast to the writing of Manto's literary peers around this time—and even distinct from some of his own writings, such as the story "Hatak" (Insult) or the well-known "Thanda Ghosht" (Cold Meat)—Black Marginalia is marked by a complete absence of sentiment or emotion. What we get instead is a series of "snapshots" of the Partition riot, ranging from two lines to two pages and offering glimpses onto the riot through various narrative perspectives: direct exchange between perpetrators, as in "Aaraam ki Zaroorat" (The Need for Rest) and "Halal Ya Jhatka" (Kosher or Not); or between perpetrators and victims ("Pathanistan," "Hamesha ki Chutti" [Permanent Vacation]) via third-person narration ("Mazdoori" [Wages]); and in one instance in the form of a newspaper report ("Saat-e-Shirin" [Sweet Moment]). Manto captures most effectively the excess that falls outside instrumentalist explanations that posit violence as a means to some stated end, connecting cause and consequence, means and ends.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Beyond Partition by Deepti Misri. Copyright © 2014 the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
