Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

After this brief excursus, here interposed to explain Manto’s preoccupation with sex providers, I cite a delightfully revealing passage from the article ‘‘Iṣmat-farōshī’.

This woman — a bawd first, a woman second — gives her body over to the man in lieu of a few coins, but a body bereft of her soul in those moments. Listen to what one such woman has to say: ‘Men take me out into the fields. I just lie there, immobile, without a sound — dead inert, only my eyes are open, gazing far, far into the distance, where some she-goats are going at one another under the shade of the trees. Oh, what an idyllic scene! I start counting the she-goats, or the ravens on the branches — nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two. . Meanwhile the man is finished, withdrawn, and is panting heavily some distance from me. But I’m not aware of any of this’ (p. 160).

This reminds me of the scene from Milan Kundera’s novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting , *where Tamina has surrendered her body to this ‘nice guy’ Hugo, not because she is after sex, but because he has promised to bring back to her the diaries she left behind in Prague when she and her now deceased husband had escaped from Czechoslovakia. They contain her memories of their life together, all those yearly vacations they took. ‘But when she was fully naked, Hugo [. .] was stupefied to discover that Tamina’s genitals were dry’ (p. 108). And when he goes into action, Tamina

quickly shut her eyes. Once again she began going through the vacations, like irregular verbs: first the vacation at the lake, then Yugoslavia, the lake, and the spa — or was it the spa, Yugoslavia, and the lake? — then the Tatras, then Bulgaria, then things got hazy, then Prague, the spa, and finally Italy (pp. 110–11) †.

Why has Tamina succumbed to Hugo — Tamina, who loved her husband dearly, and is described by the narrator touchingly as: ‘I picture the world growing up around Tamina like a circular wall, and I picture her as a small patch of grass down below. The only rose growing on that patch of grass is the memory of her husband’(p. 83).

Doesn’t this sound like a cruel paradox?

All seven parts of Kundera’s novel defy our conventional notions about the form of the novel, as they are held together polyphonically by two dominant themes, ‘laughter’ and ‘forgetting’, returning to them in umpteen variations. Eroticism, though liberally spattered, is not a dominant theme of this novel, but, as Kundera explained to Philip Roth, ‘I have the feeling that a scene of physical love generates an extremely sharp light which suddenly reveals the essence of characters and sums up their life situation’ (p. 236).

So what we have in ‘ ‘Iṣmat-farōshī’ and Laughter and Forgetting are experiences of two different women: one a prostitute, the other a but widowed woman. What is common between the two experiences is the subjects’ total state of apathy during lovemaking. Even as they go through the motions — one, because her livelihood depends on it, and the other because she sees no other way to get hold of her diaries so redolent of the memory of her dead husband — each denies herself any pleasure from the act by subtly turning off her sense of touch, her ability to feel and reciprocate, in what one might describe as a self-induced semi-comatose state. Instead, each subverts the whole meaning of the act, one by counting she-goats, the other by going through all those many vacations taken with a husband who is no more.

In short, neither heart nor soul is involved in the act being performed on their bodies. On his first diplomatic assignment in Rangoon (now Burma), Pablo Neruda — according to the reconstructed fictionalized biography of the poet by Roberto Ampuero *—used to round up a bunch of whores for something like an orgy. The whores went wild with sexual pleasure inside the undulating mosquito net, but the poet was never sure about their response and found it terribly frustrating. ‘It sounds exciting,’ the poet said, ‘but in truth it’s not so much in the end. I only entered their bodies, never their souls. Understand? I always succumbed like an exhausted castaway before the unconquerable walls of those graceful, mysterious women’ (p. 51). In other words, the soul was missing, with the noticeable difference that while the Burmese whores seemed to enjoy what they were doing, Manto’s vaishiya and Kundera’s Tamina did not.

Paradoxically, but no less poignantly, it is ‘love’ that has determined their identical response of apathy, their sensual paralysis. For one, it is a love longed-for, shimmering somewhere in some hopefully not-too-distant future when the right man comes her way. For the other, it is a love which circumstances have chosen to snatch away from her — it is not as though the ability to love, and to enjoy lovemaking with the man she loves, never existed. Tamina knows that the demands of her body will make it impossible to go on without a mate, whom she may grow to love some day. The vaishiya also knows that she will find a man with whom what she now does for a living will assume a different meaning, an utterly satisfying flavour.

I see Manto in the court, with all his disarming innocence and perplexity, asking the judge: ‘Your Honour, where is there any obscenity in all this?’

*‘Dibācha’ appeared in the author’s collection Mantonāma (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications, 1990), pp. 344–47.

*Ismat Chughtai.

*Saadat Hasan Manto, ‘Kasautī’, in Saverā , No. 3 (n.d.), p. 61.

*‘Sahae’, in Saadat Hasan Manto, Mantorāmā (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications, 1990), p. 24.

†Translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).

*This scene occurs in Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting , translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1981), pp. 219ff.

†‘Kasaut.ī’, p. 60.

‡Ibid.

*In Saadat Hasan Manto, Manto ke Mazāmīn (Lahore: Idāra-e Adabiyāt-e Nau, 1966), pp. 155–72.

*‘Fasādāt aur Hamārā Adab’, in his Insān aur Ādmī (Aligarh: Educational Book Depot, 1976), pp. 139–49.

*Muhammad Hasan Askari, ‘Hāshiya-ārā’ī’, in Saadat Hasan Manto, Mantonumā (Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications, 1991), p. 748.

†See his Foreword, in Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Avon Books, 1958), p. 7.

*In his The Life of the Drama (New York: Atheneum, 1979), pp. 195–218.

†Ibid., p. 202.

‡See her ‘Manto ki Fannī Takmīl’, in her Me‘yār (Lahore: Nayā Idāra, 1963), p. 277.

*For your sister-in-law, i.e. Raj Kishore’s wife.

*Christian.

*Muslims.

*Idiots!

*Lord of the Universe.

*The offspring of a prostitute.

*Malicious spirit.

*Village community centre for consultation, discussion and for other social activities.

*Byculla.

*Bath.

†Pandit woman.

*A saying of the Prophet Muhammad.

*The term used in the story refers to the halva offering made at Baba Tal and to the meat of an animal slaughtered by one blow of the sword. Muslims consider this method of slaughter religiously unlawful.

*Originally, ‘Stop babbling, you Santokh Pond turtle!’

*Progressive.

*England.

*The ritualistic washing in a prescribed manner before performing namaz and other religious acts.

*A prescribed prayer formula performed daily by Muslims, not to be confused with the five mandatory daily prayers (the namaz).

*Kettledrums.

*Allotment of evacuee Hindu and Sikh properties to Muslims to replace the properties they had left behind in India.