Saadat Manto - My Name Is Radha

In his non-fictional piece ‘ ‘Iṣmat-Farōshī’, *(selling of virtue: prostitution) — an impassioned defence of women who practise the world’s oldest profession — Manto goes into great detail arguing vigorously for prostitution’s similarity to every other profession, and hence, deserving of respect. We do not look down on a typist, or even a sweeper woman, why should we ride roughshod over a bawd? All three do what they do in order to earn a living. In other words, a prostitute does not forfeit her right to be an individual by the choice of her profession. We must go past her profession to see her human possibility.

In ‘Spurned’, Manto leaves the protagonist’s reasons for selling her flesh entirely opaque, or rather, creatively vague, as any good writer would. He is not interested in telling us why she opted to become a fille de joie . Was it a forced or bad marriage? Had her husband ditched her and, thus disgraced, she could not return to her parental home? Was she abducted and raped? (This is precisely what happened to many Hindu women during Partition. Many interviews with such women in Ritu Menon’s Borders and Boundaries: How Women Experienced the Partition of India attest to the fact that, after being repatriated to India, these women chose to live and die in an ashram rather than return to their ancestral homes and bring ill-repute to their families.) Or was it domestic abuse or sexual violence? Dire poverty? What? In a devilish vein, one might also posit that she turned tricks simply because she loved sex, though this possibility should quickly be ruled out because the story does not offer any compelling grounds for such an assumption. In fact, Saugandhi’s ‘mind considered sexual intimacy patently absurd’, and yet ‘Every limb of her body yearned to be worked over, to exhaustion, until fatigue had settled in and eased her into a state of delightful sleep.’ No, Manto does not give us a clue. He refrains because it is not important for him or for us to know. On the other hand, he forecloses any possibility of our being tempted, or being rash enough, to ask by deftly slipping a tiny detail into the narrative: ‘Of course, she didn’t look quite as fresh and vibrant as she did five years ago when she lived with her parents, unencumbered by any cares whatsoever.’

So there was a time, not so long ago, when Saugandhi lived a carefree life with her parents. Between that time and selling her body in a seamy neighbourhood of Bombay there lies a dark abyss into which Manto does not delve, nor does he invite us to look. Whatever happened in the intervening period is anyone’s guess, but any reason that might be suggested will have absolutely no bearing on the story or its protagonist. Manto, rather, wants us to know what happened this particular night when she was spurned and rejected by a pot-bellied seth who came along in his fancy car, pointed the beam of his flashlight at her, and sounded his disapproval with a cryptic ‘Oh no!’ Manto wants us to know how she dealt with this gut-wrenching denial of her being, this denial of who she was, by initiating a veritable ontology of selfhood.

A man feels the need for a woman, runs to the nearest brothel and finds himself one. End of story. Manto would not be doing that, would he? And if he were, what is the point of the story. No, he wants to deal with Saugandhi as a woman, yes, a woman very much her own, not simply some type that can be enlisted for a dramatic dressing down of society. What society is like is for us to decide, independently of whether it has any critical role to play in the story at hand. Manto wants to deal with Saugandhi as an individual — a fille de nuit , yes, but unlike any of her sisters in the profession. In her unexpected reaction lies the falsity of any overt or covert notion of an agenda to take society to task.

As it is, the greater number of Manto prostitutes really do not behave as one might expect them to. In the end, they vehemently resist categorization into a particular type. Many if not all — such as Siraj and Shakuntala — jealously guard their virginity by not letting any ‘passengers’ (Manto’s favourite word for a prostitute’s client) ride their train. And they all seem to crave love and suffer from its absence in their desolate lives. Siraj had willingly eloped with her lover, who ran away during the night leaving her asleep in the hotel. This clouded her entire existence. Only after she had exacted her vengeance — turning the tables on her fickle lover by spending a whole night with him and then abandoning him in like manner, throwing her burqa over him while he slept at that — could she recover. Society plays little, if any, part in this drama, or in the story ‘Shārdā.’ Sharda gives herself physically to Nazir in a manner he had never experienced before, but she is unwilling to enter the profession or allow her sister to enter it. When she leaves Nazir, who does not believe in love, she does so with a dignity few ‘respectable’ women could rival. Zeenat, the Kashmiri kabutri in ‘Babu Gopinath’, eventually settles down with the respectable Hyderabadi landowner Ghulam Ali. And Kanta opens the door for her pimp Khushia while she is stark naked. Khushia does not like this show of immodesty. ‘You could have let me know you were bathing. I would have come back another time.’ She smiles and throws every ounce of his male pride into a tumultuous vortex with her answer, ‘When you said it was Khushia, I thought, “What’s the harm. It’s just our Khushia. Let him come in.”’

And Navab of ‘Behind the Reeds’, as the narrator tells us, ‘wasn’t averse to her profession’. When her mother, or ‘whoever she was’, introduces her to her first man, the terribly simple and naive girl thinks that this is how young women ‘were initiated into their youth’. She gets ‘accustomed to her prostitute’s existence’ and believes that her life’s ultimate purpose lay in sleeping with men, and she quite liked the expensive silks and jewellery they brought as gifts. There is no trace of regret in her acceptance of this life. But ‘she was every bit an indecent young woman — which is how our noble and chaste ladies are wont to look upon her and her ilk — but truth be told, she didn’t realize even for a moment that she was living a life of sin’.

If we look at these women as individuals, all the talk about society’s role in reducing them to a life of ignominy and want loses much of its force. Manto doesn’t use ‘Spurned’ as an occasion to spill his guts against society’s treatment of ‘fallen’ women. (Nor do these women themselves indulge in this exercise.) He is far removed from handing out judgements. In fact, he would not even use the word ‘fallen’ to describe these women because of its judgemental overtones. Rather, he is using the story as an occasion to discover some truth about the person that Saugandhi is. And in doing so, he shrewdly guards his role as a narrator, never once surrendering his neutrality and objectivity. This is in contrast to a story such as ‘Nannhī ki Nānī’ (Tiny’s Granny), where Ismat Chughtai has smothered the individuality of the granny and turned her into a veritable mouthpiece for the author to vent her righteous anger against society. Manto never allows his narrator to transform into an interventionist, not even when the narrator bears his own name, which happens quite often in his stories. At several points in the short story ‘Sirāj’, Manto purposely alerts us to the fact that as a writer-narrator he has no right to inject his own reactions and thoughts into the story. For instance, ‘This was more than enough detail for me. How I reacted to it is my concern, not something I should tell you, not as a short story writer anyway.’ And, I would rather not talk about the backstory my mind had woven for Siraj, […].’ What lingers in our minds after we are done reading ‘Shārdā’ is her immense grace and dignity, not how good she was at sex, but her love for Nazir. Giving herself so tenderly, so fully was a consequence of that love, not the result of some pathology of eroticism or promiscuity.