Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

Where Ghulam Abbas could get away by writing his masterly suggestive ‘Aanandi’ without stepping on the toes of the ever-vigilant law, Manto was dragged to the court on a charge of obscenity for a number of his stories. But, even if one subjected Manto’s so-called ‘obscene’ stories to the harshest scrutiny, one would come away terribly disappointed, unable to find anything remotely smutty. (In Judge Siddiqi’s words, ‘He hadn’t used a single obscene word in the story [‘Upar, Neeche, aur Darmiyan’], which is absolutely true’ (187)). Such stories do not dwell on the sex act and its titillating details, but simply use lovemaking to underscore some aspect of the character’s mind and personality. Not a whiff of a desire to excite or inflame the reader’s passion is noticeable in those of Manto’s stories characterized as obscene. Take, for instance, ‘Thanda Gosht’ (literally, cold meat). The language of the back-and-forth between Kalwant Kaur and Eshar Singh might appear to contradict what I have said, but only if the end of the story is thrown overboard. However, the power of the story’s denouement, which does not derive from sex, breaks upon the reader’s senses with such overwhelming force that he can’t even think of anything else. Besides, the language of the couple swings perfectly with the personality of the characters. It is the very idea of promiscuity that raises the hackles of ‘righteous’ people. And relations between the lawfully married — though they can be as stormy and gratifying as anything with a prostitute — are not something you talk about. You just do it, in the privacy of your bedroom, or wherever else its indomitable force overtakes you. Chances are, God will even reward you for it. (Marry and be fruitful, something like that — remember?)

While a goodly number visited prostitutes, and no power was ever able to root out this ‘vice’ from society, words such as tawaif, vaishiya, kasbi, randi, rakhel and what have you, were taboo in polite society. Now, it was a different matter if in a different city while on a debating contest tour, students of the team didn’t fail to scout out its red-light district.

Manto’s problem, if it was a problem at all, was his straight thinking, and even more, his straight-talking. He didn’t care about such taboos. If people made love, then there was nothing wrong in talking about it, especially when the subject of his stories was not the act but what lay behind it in the protagonist’s psyche. According to the aforementioned judge, ‘[Manto] told me that the story in question was to a large extent based on real events. So if it was obscene, there was little he could do about it. Contemporary society was itself obscene. He merely portrays what he sees. .’ (187). Which made the judge conclude, ‘Precisely at that moment the realization hit me in all its intensity that this man was a true artist. Manto didn’t have the foggiest idea that he had written anything obscene; he had merely written a short story’ (186).

A few years ago I read Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel Corruption . *The subject of this fictional piece is familiar to South Asians, who daily witness the myriad forms of this abominable practice in their national life. The novel contains numerous graphic descriptions of the love life of a lawfully wedded couple. How graphic? To give you a foretaste of what you will find there, here are a few lines of the intimacy of this lawfully wedded couple:

Was it love? My shyness, my hang-ups, and my seriousness were handicaps to knowing the truth. Now, I know that I desired her physically. At the beginning of our marriage we spent a lot of time making love. What was surprising was that she went wild in bed. She made love with her entire body. One day, from underneath the bed, she pulled out the book of Sheikh Nafzaouvi, a manual of Muslim erotology, and decided that for one month we were going to execute every position described by the sheikh, twenty-nine in all. It was funny: we made love with a manual in front of us. She knew this book by heart and recited entire passages to me. I memorized a few names of positions I found comical, like ‘black-smith’s copulation,’ ‘the camel’s hump,’ ‘Archimedes’ vice,’ and so on. Why the black-smith? At a certain moment, while the woman is on her back, ‘her knees raised toward her chest so that her vulva is exposed, the man executes the movements of copulation, then removes his member and slides it between the woman’s thighs, like the black-smith removing the red-hot iron from the fire. .’ (p. 10).

Far be it from Manto to use such graphic language, or even the language used by Mir Dard and Momin Khan Momin in their masnavīs, which Manto has cited elsewhere *as telling specimens of what is called ‘obscenity’. But even in Corruption , this minor detail, like so many others, tells the reader something about the inner workings of the protagonist’s mind — a simple, upright man who would not accept a bribe, in any form or fashion, because such practices went against his conscience, his innate sense of moral fairness. By the time we finish the novel, the minuscule details of his married life are entirely forgotten, submerged, as it were, in the trials and tribulations which Mourad, a decent, honest man, must go through in order to live a decent, honest life. Then again, reference to conjugal intimacy is not thrown into the novel merely wilfully, nor for titillation. Mourad has come to doubt whether it was he who wanted to marry his wife or she who had trapped him using cunning and wile. The doubt has surfaced because she, a competitive, ambitious woman, pining to live a luxurious life and keep up with the Joneses, never fails to hold him responsible for their modest style of living, insinuating in so many ways that he ought to adopt the ways of the world, of his colleagues — i.e., start accepting bribes.

Which, of course, is not the case with Aziz Ahmad’s short story ‘Pagdandī’ (literally, foot trail), †where it is hard to see Azad, the protagonist who is studying in Paris, as anything other than a sex maniac, forever chasing after young women. Although in his later years Aziz Ahmad did quite a bit to redeem himself by writing on Muslim intellectual history, it is hard to miss an undercurrent of sexuality qua sexuality in some of his earlier fictional work. Anyway, faking love, Azad finally gets what he wanted. He takes Yvonne for an outing to a small village on the banks of the Seine, some twenty miles from Paris. As they are walking on a foot trail, Yvonne censures him for being an incorrigible materialist.

‘Revolutionaries are materialists too,’ he said and kissed her again. This time she melted completely. He thought that perhaps no one had kissed her so passionately before, no one had taken such liberties with her body. He knew that at this moment her mind was completely incapable of dealing with the complexities of revolution, materialism, communism, love, and emotions. What was evident, though, was that her warm, young flesh was trembling with excitement. He didn’t let the opportunity slip. He lifted her in his arms, quickly found a spot in the thicket, gently laid her down and started to unbutton her pale yellow jacket. He caressed her breasts, which resembled pink blossoms among the lush green trees. Then he covered her whole body with his like a stretch of cloud spreading itself over a clump of flourishing trees.

Later, when he helped her get up from the bed of grass he felt a strange feeling of satisfaction wash over him. This girl was not a virgin, and he was not the first man in her life. Some other comrade, some other revolutionary and materialist had kissed her before, taken liberties with her body and accepted her virginity as a tribute (p. 202).

Lyricism aside, ‘comrade’, ‘revolutionary’, ‘materialism’, ‘communism’—the familiar Progressive jargon is all here, and serves no useful purpose, except samañ-bandī (atmospherics), if that can be a purpose, or simply an act to use Yvonne for his own pleasure. The story doesn’t move beyond lovemaking, minus the love. Yvonne, too, is a terribly immature, indecisive, naïve and confused girl, with no ability to fathom the impulses of her body. Then again, perhaps she is none of these and this is only how the narrator chooses to see her; after all, he too is an Indian. The story tells us precious little about the ideological underpinnings of this self-conceited, self-obsessed protagonist. What it does tell us, though, is something we can well do without, for if we reflect a bit more, a none-too-wholesome window will burst open to reveal the preoccupations of a flamboyant scion blowing his parents’ money in Europe not on study but on ‘skirt-chasing’. The only image of the protagonist that is formed in our minds after we are finished reading the story is that of a young Indian man desperately trying to bed down with a white European woman, with the belief, rampant among the élite of the South Asian subcontinent back in pre-Partition days (and maybe even now), that European women are promiscuous and easy to get. Now, this is what Manto would unhesitatingly call ‘obscene’.