The Depiction of Partition Horror in Saadat Hasan Manto’s Stories ‘the Return’ and ‘colder than Ice’

The Partition of India in 1947 was a cataclysmic event. Was it inevitable? What would have been the shape of things if there had been no division? What would have been the state of relations between Hindus and Muslims? Would they have learned to live together in amity? Or would there have been a continual civil war? Whatever be the answers, no one could possibly tell. However, the great tragedy of the Partition lay in the sectarian and religious bloodletting that preceded and followed it. To till this day, no one knows with any degree of accuracy how many people on both sides of the divide were massacred in cold blood. Savagery such as that witnessed at the time of Partition has few parallels in history. A fierce madness seems to have taken hold of people who had lived together for centuries. In 1947, something snapped. And there was but one man who tried to make sense of what had happened. He was not a politician- but a writer. His name was Saadat Hasan Manto.

Saadat Hasan Manto, the most widely read and the most controversial short-story writer in Urdu, was born on 11 May, 1912 at Samrala in Punjab’s Ludhiana district. In a literary career spread over more than two decades, he produced twenty-two collections of short stories, one novel, five collections of radio plays, three collections of essays, two collections of personal sketches and many scripts for films. He was tried for obscenity half a dozen times, thrice before and thrice after Independence. Some of Manto’s greatest work was produced in the last seven years of his life, a time of great financial and emotional hardship for him. He died several months short of his forty-third birthday, in January 1955, in Lahore. Much was written about 1947 but little of it has survived as literature. One of these surviving pieces is the anthology of English translations of Manto’s most powerful pieces - ‘Mottled Dawn’. Translated by Khalid Hasan, the collection includes unforgettable stories like ‘Toba Tek Singh’, ‘The Return’, ‘The Assignment’, and ‘Colder Than Ice’ among many others, bringing alive the most tragic event in the history of the Indian subcontinent. In this paper, the focus will particularly be on ‘The Return’ (‘Khol Do’) and ‘Colder Than Ice’ (‘Thanda Gosht’).

Manto’s stories are about partition – yet there is no mention of ‘Hindu, ’ ‘Muslim, ’ ‘India’ or ‘Pakistan’ in them. This is what makes them so striking, and relevant, even to this day. Wrote Manto: “I came to accept this nightmarish reality (Partition) without self-pity or despair. I tried to retrieve from this man-made sea of blood pearls of a rare hue, the single-minded dedication with which men killed men, the remorse felt by some, and the tears shed by murderers. . . " On the whole, there is an utter lack of contextual detail or description of personality or identity in the stories. He saw the vast tragedy of 1947 with detachment, but not indifference because he cared deeply. The prose brings out the enormity of the tragedy set in motion by the great divide. They are deeply ironic and very often, deeply moving.

In the story, ‘The Return’ for instance, we are given no details about the protagonist Sirajuddin’s identity. Instead, we are immediately thrown into the confusion and terror of a refugee camp. As the events unfold, we continue to process them in a raw, immediate way. Sirajuddin asks a group of eight armed young Muslim men to look for his missing seventeen year old daughter, Sakina. We are eventually told that the men are successful in finding her and are kind to her. Sakina, who has been recovered from India and brought to Lahore by the volunteers lies on a bed in a hospital. She is comatose and has been raped so brutally by both, her abductors as well as her rescuers, who abandon her by a railway track later, that, when the doctor brings her distraught father in to see if she is the abducted daughter he has been looking for, she undoes the string that holds her salwar (loose trousers) in place as she hears the words “Open it”. She pulls the garment down and opens her thighs. It was only the window in the room that the doctor wanted opened. Her father does not notice but screams with joy, “She is alive. My daughter is alive!”Here, we see that perhaps the most striking of Manto’s techniques for achieving the impression of artlessness and immediacy is found in his endings, which, in the best of stories, manage simultaneously to be almost weightless, mere throwaways- and yet devastating. There is no great crescendo; often the stories seem not to end at all, but to trail away. Confronted with these horrific scenes, the only possible reaction is a shake of the head, an acknowledgement of the horror, a tinge of the fear. Furthermore, the story typifies what the traumatic partition did to ordinary people. In recounting the stories of nameless and faceless millions, Manto chooses the metaphor of a woman to highlight the ‘gang rape’ of humanity that was a hallmark of 1947.

One of his non-fictional short stories, ‘Colder Than Ice’ (‘Thanda Gosht’), which is considered to be the best piece of imaginative prose about the communal violence of 1947 and a story for which Manto was tried for obscenity charges in Pakistan, is set in the time where there is an ongoing battle between the Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. Ishwar Singh, a strong and well built Sikh goes on a looting mission in the neighbourhood. He succeeds in breaking into a Muslim household. Looting all the valuables, he inhumanly kills all the six out of seven members present in the family. The left out member was a beautiful girl. Ishwar Singh abducts her and rapes her out of spite for her community only to find that he was molesting a dead girl, whose body was already cold. After coming home to his wife, Kalwant Kaur, he is not sexually aroused by her when she tries to seduce him. He keeps thinking about the woman he raped. The wife is enraged is sure that he has been with another woman. She stabs him with his own kirpaan (dagger). As he gasps for breath, dying, he recounts the chilling experience that has rendered him impotent. Here, Kalwant, is seen as the woman who uses her agency to avenge. She is not portrayed as helpless and cowardly. The rage in Kalwant’s reaction shows her power to challenge the husband. Instead of being submissive and subservient she uses her power to punish him for his infidelity. The story also shows how women were seen as an object and their honour is an extension of the honour of men. Rape therefore was used as a tool to rid the rival community of their honour.

Manto’s stories mark his impeccable vision on the partition horror. Both, ‘The Return’ and ‘Colder Than Ice’ witness a crisis of feminity through rape. The woman in the former story is an example of those women who were not abducted but were dislocated in the communal chaos, and were subjected to multiple rapes. Sakina is that woman, who is completely suppressed and becomes hapless at the hands of men. The most shocking aspect in the narrative is the unmasking of hypocrite men, who in the name of social work, take undue advantage of the situation in fulfilling their carnal desires. The narrative also exposes the exploitation of men by men who belong to the same community. Sirajuddin, being a Muslim, with Islamic ideals in his mind that a Muslim can’t be a rival to his brother, seeks a helping hand.

Manto attempts to represent the impact of a near-necrophiliac experience on the psyche of Ishwar Singh, who participates in loot and rape. His state of impotence after the inadvertent rape of the Muslim girl is inexplicable to him and his wife. Manto’s ability to get to the root of pathological forms of desire, rather than simply representing the symptoms marks his uniqueness. There prevailed a sense of inability and refusal to identify the other during the sexual violence and sadism. This is exemplified in the case of Ishwar Singh’s admission of horror at realising that he had raped a dead Muslim girl. His subsequent impotency is the fallout of lack of mutual recognition in the previous rapes committed by him. He finally suffers a kind of excruciating death because of his horrific memory that haunted his mind even before his wife stabbed him.