Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

If a beautiful, healthy young girl from a respectable family runs away with an ugly, scrawny, penniless young man, we don’t call her a wretch. Surely others will drag her past, her present and her future before a moral tribunal. Conversely, we will do nothing of the sort; we will instead try to undo the tiny knot that had numbed her sense of judgement.

Humans are not very different from one another. One person can commit the same mistake another has. If one woman can open shop in the bazaar to sell her body, so can every other woman. Man is not culpable; his circumstances are — circumstances that lead him to commit his mistakes and live through their consequences.

In 1942, my short story ‘Kālī Shalwār’ [The Black Shalwar] appeared in the special annual number of the monthly literary magazine Adab-e Latīf (Lahore). Some people consider it obscene. I’m writing this article to disabuse them of their mistaken notion.

Writing short stories is my profession. I know all the ins and outs of this art. I have written many others on this subject before the story in question. None of them are smutty, nor will the many more which I will write on this subject in the future be so.

Storytelling goes all the way back to the fall of Adam, and will continue, I believe, till doomsday, though it will go through many incarnations. However, man will persist in communicating his feelings to the ears of other men. A lot has already been written about prostitutes; a lot more will be written. What one sees will always provoke discussion and writing. Prostitutes are not a recent phenomenon; they have existed in our midst for thousands of years. They figure even in sacred books. Now that there is no longer any scope for a fresh heavenly book or a new prophet, you won’t read about them in the sacred lines of revelations, but rather in newspapers, magazines, or books, which you can pore over, unencumbered by the need to surround yourself in the spiralling haze of aloes-wood and frankincense smoke, and, when done, toss in the trash bin.

Well, I’m someone who writes in such magazines and books. I write because I feel I have something to say. I share with others the way I see things, and the angle from which I see them. If writers are lunatics, please consider me a lunatic as well.

The backdrop of ‘Kālī Shalwār’ is a prostitute’s lodging. It isn’t as astonishing as the nest of a weaverbird, about which we hear all kinds of wonderful things. In Delhi, they have set up an area exclusively for such women and built numberless residential units to house them. My Sultāna also lives in one such unit. She hasn’t constructed it herself like the weaverbird, nor does she catch fireflies to light it in the evening like that bird. For light, there was electricity, and since she couldn’t get that for free, any more than she could the unit in which she lived, she had to work. Had she been married, all this would have come to her free. But she wasn’t married and she was a woman. When a woman is obliged to pay for lodgings and electricity and is saddled with a good-for-nothing layabout like Khuda Bakhsh, who trusts in God and runs after fakirs and holy men, it’s obvious that she can’t be the kind of woman we see in our respectable homes.

My Sultāna is a brothel woman. She does precisely what women do in a brothel; it is her profession. Who doesn’t know these women? Nearly every city and town has its red-light district. Who isn’t aware of running gutters — nearly every city and town has them, and they’re there to carry away the filth.

If we can talk about our marbled bathrooms, about soaps and lavenders, why can’t we talk about these drains and gutters that carry away the filth of our bodies? If we can talk about temples and mosques, why not about whorehouses visited by some people on their way back from those temples and mosques? If we can talk about opium, bhang, charas and wine contracts, why not about brothels where this stuff is consumed liberally?

We treat bhangi s as untouchable. Whenever one of them passes by carrying the basket of our filth, we instantly cover our noses with handkerchiefs. Surely we find it all revolting, but just as surely we can’t deny their existence, any more than we can deny the faeces we discharge daily from our bowels. Medications for treating constipation and diarrhoea exist because it is necessary to purge noxious matter from our bodies. New ways to flush out the filth are being thought up continually because it piles up daily. If by some miracle our bodies could be transformed and its functions undergo a radical change, we wouldn’t be caught dead talking about constipation and diarrhoea. Likewise, if some mechanical methods could be invented to dispose of our filth, sweepers would go out of business.

If the talk is about sweepers, garbage and filth will inevitably figure in it. Just as inevitably, what prostitutes do will feature in the conversation when we talk about them.

We don’t visit a prostitute’s chamber to offer ritual prayer or shower blessings upon the Prophet. Why, we go there because. . Well, it’s obvious. We go there because we can, and buy freely and without objection what we’ve come for. Now, if we’re allowed to go there without restriction, if any woman can decide to become a prostitute of her own free will, get a licence and start selling her body, if such a transaction is sanctioned by law, then why can’t we talk about her?

If talking about her is obscene, her existence is no less obscene. If taking about her is forbidden, her business too should be forbidden. Remove the prostitute and we’ll cease talking about her without any prompting.

We talk openly about lawyers, barbers, laundrymen, innkeepers and kunjars; relate stories about thieves, shoplifters, thugs and highwaymen; fabricate tall tales about fairies and genies; make preposterous claims such as the Earth is balanced on the two horns of a bull; author Dāstān-e Amīr Hamza and the tale of Totā-Mainā ; praise the mace of Landhūr the wrestler; talk about ‘Amr the Trickster’s magical cap and bag; and recite stories of parrots and mynahs who can speak in any language. We can talk about wizards and their incantations and how to neutralize the effects of their spells, and discuss whatever our fancy demands about spells cast by spirits, and about the practice of alchemy. We can quarrel about the length of beards and trousers and hair. We can think up new recipes for cooking rogan josh, pilaf and korma and wonder what kind and colour of buttons would go well with a green fabric. Then why can’t we think about prostitutes and talk about their profession or comment on their clients?

We can make a girl and boy fall in love and set up their first rendezvous at the tomb-sanctuary of Dātā Ganjbakhsh and drag along an old hag as their go-between so the two restless souls can meet often. We can squash their romance in the end or make them take poison and arrange for their coffins to be borne out from their respective neighbourhoods at the same time, and have the lovers buried, by some miracle, in adjoining graves, and, if need be, arrange for angels to shower flowers over them. .

Why, then, can’t we talk about the life of a prostitute, who needs no angels or flowers? When she dies no one from neighbourhoods other than her own joins the funeral procession and no grave ever wants to be next to hers. Her existence itself is a coffin which society is carrying aloft on its shoulders. Unless she is interred for good, there will be talk about her.

Even if this corpse is in a state of decomposition, is stinking, is grotesque and revolting, what is so wrong in seeing its face? Does she have no connection to us? Is she not one of our own? We will remove the shroud from her face now and then to look at it and show it to others.