By Sana Khan for TwoCircles.net
When the horrific details of the rape and murder of an eight-year-old nomadic Muslim girl came in news, it troubled one and all. To find that a group was formed in support of those arrested by the J&K police crime branch, and a rally with the national flag was taken out for the same, it shocked everyone. Much has been written on it since.
One of the most fragile and difficult tasks for human beings has been how to express anger at injustice. Why is it that a girl’s or a woman’s body become an easy site to ‘dishonour’ the other community? Why is it that their bodies become sites of conquest and sexual assault? The brutal and violent unleashing of male sexuality time and again uses rape and violence against women to assert the power of one community over the other. Patriarchy shows it’s most ugly face and women are left helpless victims of barbarity and notion of honour.
As I write this I remember Manto. Today is his 116th birth anniversary. Those of us who don’t know Manto, he was arguably the most controversial Urdu writer, born in Samrala, now in the Indian state of Punjab. He was not even forty-three when he died in Lahore, Pakistan on 18th January, 1955. In this short period, he gave the world an enthralling body of literature.
You can see Manto’s sakina or a shareefan in that eight-year-old girl from Kashmir. Manto appeals to us because his stories disenchant us with the apparent truths of our own times. He is especially relevant at the present moment in history because our society is plunged into sectarian and communal killings, against which Manto wrote vehemently.
I wish to refer to two of Manto’s stories which are fragmentary records of cries of pain, vile sexuality, violation and pleas of mercy and also of hope. Manto’s story Khol do – Sirajuddin asks eight young ‘razakdars’ (volunteers) in a refugee camp in Pakistan to search for his daughter, who was left behind in India. These volunteers find her, give her milk and food to eat, then rape her and finally abandon her. Later she is brought to a doctor’s tent in the camp. “The doctor turned towards the body on the stretcher, then took her pulse and said pointing at the window. “Open it” the body on the stretcher stirred. Lifeless hands pulled the cord holding up the salwar… And pulled the salwar down and opened her thighs… Old Sirajuddin shouted with joy, “She’s alive… My daughter is alive.” The doctor broke into a cold sweat.” One doesn’t know how to respond to a story of this kind. It is profoundly depressing. The last words of Sirajuddin are not like some patriarchs who during partition refused to forgive and accept women for getting raped during the riots. Instead one senses ‘hope’ in it. This story explains how language betrays and “how ordinary people in whose religiosity and decency others had placed faith, become ruthless killers.” One is definitely shaken and in the same cold sweat as the doctor after reading the story. This story might give yet another fictive testimony recording historical trauma that some women were kept for days by men and repeatedly raped by them to satisfy themselves sexually (does it remind you again of the kathua victim?).
Another story Sharifan is a story of a man, Qasim, who upon finding his daughter, Sharifan’s body bruised and naked is grief stricken. She has been raped by Hindu men. He forgets about the blood soaked body of his wife or the pain because of the bullet in his thigh. Seeing his daughter’s body like that he goes completely mad out of rage; picks up his axe and like a demented man kills men one after the other. He almost becomes sad that in this wild killing he was still alive but again Sharifan’s naked and bruised body comes in front of his eyes and he starts moving around the town to kill Hindus. He stops in front of a house and screams. A young girl comes out and upon knowing that she is a Hindu he tears off her clothes and ravages her for half an hour like an animal… the girl faints. “When he finished, he realised that he was clutching her throat with both hands, his nails embedded into her soft skin. He released her with a violent jerk. He closed his eyes and saw an image of his daughter, lying dead on the floor, her small breasts pointing upwards. He broke into an icy sweat.” Another man comes into the house and shouts “what are you doing in my house? With a trembling finger, Qasim pointed to the blanket-covered heap on the floor. ‘Sharifan’, he said in a hollow voice. The other man pulled off the blanket. The sword fell from his hand; then he staggered out of the house wailing, ‘Bimla, my daughter, Bimla.”
Many of the fiction narratives of partition depict this pathological distortions and perversions during that time. Whether it was to satisfy sexual hunger or to take revenge and dishonour the ‘other’ community, without a doubt one can say that the worst sufferers of Partition were women. What is profoundly despairing is that we see the repetition of these narratives even today. The stories remain the same. Manto has written a history of the everyday in the extraordinary.
Manto’s world recognizes differences and does not necessarily demand equality but emphasizes on human dignity. When normal becomes barbaric and banal, perhaps it is the marginality, madness, and creativity that build the secular. This space belongs to the common people – where secularism and humanism offer a room of affinity that allows one to share intimacies, where people need faith, trust, conversation, and an exchange of bodies, minds, and cultures. Manto’s secularism thrived outside the world of politics, where one revisits, recalls, and returns. We need this secularism today. Perhaps we need Manto’s Toba Tek Singh, a Sikh who stands on no man’s land between two “pious” and “ethically pure” nations and calls down curses upon them (like “Opad di gurgur di moong di daal di laltain di Hindustan te Pakistan di dur phitey munh.” To crudely capture its essence, it means ‘to hell with both Hindustan and Pakistan. What strikes me most in the story is the tragedy of common people whose lives turned upside down when political decisions are suddenly thrust upon them. One sympathizes with the victim and also the aggressor as both of them are caught in the collapse of reason as they break away from physical or psychological securities that have shaped their beings. Manto’s creative literature on the theme of partition presents a bottom of history, the continuities in time; human consciousness and partition are not historicized as an event of the past as it perpetually keeps digging into the present. His works of a profoundly troubled soul concerned with human experiences, morality and actions when the world had lost all reason (political and social) remind us of our humanity and encourage to truly being secular. There in lies the relevance of Manto. May we realise this before it’s too late.
The author is currently pursuing her PhD in Sociology from JNU, New Delhi