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This essay reads Saadat Hasan Manto's short story, \"Thanda Gosht\" (1950), depicting women's experience of sectarian brutality during the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, to delineate the postcolonial significance Gayatri Spivak's concept of originary queerness. Manto's synecdoche (\"cold meat\") for an unnamed and raped female corpse, her Sikh abductor and violator, as well as for the story's readers, (re)figures reproductive heteronormativity as a process of unknowing that emplaces a gendered taxonomy, even when its victims are silent. Rather than reinforce sexual difference as a finished itinerary, however, Kulwant Kaur's repeatedly piercing question--who she is--queers \"Thanda Gosht\" by taking us to a \"she\" who we cannot imagine but seem to know. This tarrying with originary queerness \"in its place\" (Spivak, \"Gender\" 817, emphases added) dockets an unpredictable futurity made especially resonant by the chill that asseverates from Ishar's Singh's use of a peculiar affective idiom to describe his encounter with the unnamed and raped corpse, whose originary queerness inverts a teleological trajectory to manifest (the fight for) Nation as (visiting) \"burre ki ma ka ghar\" [phrase omitted] R; the house of Bad's mother). This place, far from patriarchal honor and protection, makes a \"zaalim\" ( bloodthirsty) of (\"us\") all, such that we cannot say what happened.

The paper studies how various shades of love respond to precarity in anarchic times by comparing the narrative representation of the aftermath of the Partition of the British colonized Subcontinent into independent countries of India and Pakistan in 1947 with particular focus on Sikh-Muslim relationships in Punjab as presented in Khushwant Singh's novel Train to Pakistan and Saadat Hasan Manto's short story \"Gurmukh Singh ki Wasiyat.\" Employing Judith Butler's concept of precarity, the paper analyzes how both the writers sketch precarity in partition times ensuing in post-Partition communal violence and effacement of love. The selection of the texts is significant because Singh presents precarity in the multi-ethnic village of Mano Majra whereas Manto presents the city of Amritsar on fire, thus encompassing rural and urban life. Both the texts gradually unleash how the love between communities fades away precipitated by the increasing violence while personal love unflinchingly last even during the times of anarchy, irrespective of communal and religious differences. Jugga who is a Sikh by ethnicity sacrifices his life for his Muslim beloved Nooran and Gurmukh Sing assigns the responsibility of his unflinching gratitude for Mr Abdul Hayee to his son after his death. Whereas before the Partition personal and communal commitments were equally strong, the divergence takes place between the two due to the precarity after Partition that rifts communities apart but personal love remains resilient to socio-political pressures.

This essay reads Saadat Hasan Manto's short story, \"Thanda Gosht\" (1950), depicting women's experience of sectarian brutality during the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, to delineate the postcolonial significance Gayatri Spivak's concept of originary queerness. Manto's synecdoche (\"cold meat\") for an unnamed and raped female corpse, her Sikh abductor and violator, as well as for the story's readers, (re)figures reproductive heteronormativity as a process of unknowing that emplaces a gendered taxonomy, even when its victims are silent. Rather than reinforce sexual difference as a finished itinerary, however, Kulwant Kaur's repeatedly piercing question--who she is--queers \"Thanda Gosht\" by taking us to a \"she\" who we cannot imagine but seem to know This tarrying with originary queerness \"in its place\" (Spivak, \"Gender\" 817, emphases added) dockets an unpredictable futurity made especially resonant by the chill that asseverates from Ishar's Singh's use of a peculiar affective idiom to describe his encounter with the unnamed and raped corpse, whose originary queerness inverts a teleological trajectory to manifest (the fight for) Nation as (visiting) \"burre ki ma ka ghar\" ([phrase omitted]; the house of Bad's mother). This place, far from patriarchal honor and protection, makes a \"zaalim\" ([phrase omitted]; bloodthirsty) of (\"us\") all, such that we cannot say what happened. Keywords: Spivak, Originary Queerness, Manto, Thanda Gosht, Subaltern, Postcolonial, Sexual Difference

In the case of literature, our exposure to the Partition of India might well be limited to the stories of Saadat Hasan Manto (1912–55), acclaimed by many as the greatest writer on the subject. Manto is justly famous for writing stories about Partition that are “humane” in the sense of depicting terrible events and registering their emotional impact; making the reader feel, to the extent that words can, the terribleness. But they are also ethically disconcerting in their abruptness. One of Manto’s starkest and best known Partition stories is “Khol do”: “The Return” or, much more literally, “Open It!” The reading that follows takes account of all of these options: Manto’s Urdu original, but also two readily available English translations (both published by Penguin India) which differ in much more than just their titles. These differences do not reflect a lack of competence on the part of either translator, nor merely the ambiguity of the specific words that Manto uses, but rather some of the extremely difficult ethical issues that the story leads us into. Another author who describes trauma, seems drawn to numbers, and has provoked anger and hostility is Moroccan Tahar Ben Jelloun (born in 1944). Analogies to the movement of exposure, transgression and possible betrayal, of which Ben Jelloun has been accused, can be found starkly pre-figured in his 2001 novel \"Cette aveuglante absence de lumière\" (published in English in 2002 as \"This Blinding Absence of Light\"), which fictionalizes the experiences of young soldiers who took part in the attempted coup d’état of July 1971 against the Moroccan king Hassan II, and were subsequently held for many years in extremely harsh conditions at the secret prison of Tazmamart. Although, by the time Ben Jelloun wrote this novel, the prison had been exposed and the surviving prisoners released, there is still a labor of retrieval and liberation to be done. Whereas Manto shocks by the brevity with which he shows life thrown away, Ben Jelloun performs a remarkable labor of stretching the most exiguous lives over hundreds of pages.

The paper discusses the importance of one's native land in shaping one's identity. Through a study of Manto's famous story \"Toba Tek Singh,\" it tries to explore how the innocent victims of the Partition found solace in the cliché of lunacy as a means of escaping the atrocities of violence and displacement and how the insane refused to allow society to usurp their democratic rights of belonging to a certain place. The first part of the paper deals with the basic ideas of existentialism - its features and major practitioners. The second part examines in detail Manto's story to trace the elements of existentialism in it - how the asylum becomes the miniature of contemporary society, the politics of space in the geographical idea of location, and how madness and identity crisis become a unique form of resistance to exercise the freedom of choice. The paper concludes by tracing the importance of these partition narratives that made people aware enough to never allow such humanmade massacres.

Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955) was an established Urdu short story writer and a rising screenwriter in Bombay at the time of India's partition in 1947, and he is perhaps best known for the short stories he wrote following his migration to Lahore in newly formed Pakistan. Today Manto is an acknowledged master of twentieth-century Urdu literature, and his fiction serves as a lens through which the tragedy of partition is brought sharply into focus. InThe Pity of Partition, Manto's life and work serve as a prism to capture the human dimension of sectarian conflict in the final decades and immediate aftermath of the British raj. Ayesha Jalal draws on Manto's stories, sketches, and essays, as well as a trove of his private letters, to present an intimate history of partition and its devastating toll. Probing the creative tension between literature and history, she charts a new way of reconnecting the histories of individuals, families, and communities in the throes of cataclysmic change. Jalal brings to life the people, locales, and events that inspired Manto's fiction, which is characterized by an eye for detail, a measure of wit and irreverence, and elements of suspense and surprise. In turn, she mines these writings for fresh insights into everyday cosmopolitanism in Bombay and Lahore, the experience and causes of partition, the postcolonial transition, and the advent of the Cold War in South Asia. The first in-depth look in English at this influential literary figure,The Pity of Partitiondemonstrates the revelatory power of art in times of great historical rupture.

In the Urdu story \"Yes Master\" the childlike simplicity of Manto's language has been translated effectively by Asma Rafiq which relates to the protagonist Qasim - a ten year old boy serving as a domestic help in a household. The poem \"How to Overcome a Bad Day\" by the Malayali author Kala Sajeevan directs us towards another form of aphasia or speechlessness where the pain and discomfort of a woman can never be depicted, and a woman is always expected to be happy and beautiful. The image of darkness in the poem indicates the absence of representation of women's bad days, which are supposed to be covered by proper makeup, false self-decorations and feigned happiness.

This essay reads Saadat Hasan Manto s short story \"Thanda Gosht\" (1950), depicting womens experience of sectarian brutality during the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, to delineate the postcolonial significance Gayatri Spivaks concept of originary queerness. Mantos synecdoche (\"cold meat\") for an unnamed and raped female corpse, her Sikh abductor and violator, as well as for the story's readers, (re)figures reproductive heteronormativity as a process of unknowing that emplaces a gendered taxonomy, even when its victims are silent. Rather than reinforce sexual difference as a finished itinerary, however, Kulwant Kaurs repeatedly piercing question-who she is-queers \"Thanda Gosht\" by taking us to a \"she\" who we cannot imagine but seem to know. This tarrying with originary queerness \"in its place\" (Spivak, \"Gender\" 817, emphases added) dockets an unpredictable futurity made especially resonant by the chill that asseverates from Ishar s Singh's use of a peculiar affective idiom to describe his encounter with the unnamed and raped corpse, whose originary queerness inverts a teleological trajectory to manifest (the fight for) Nation as (visiting) \"burre ki ma ka ghar\" (... the house of Bad's mother). This place, far from patriarchal honor and protection, makes a \"zaalim\" (... bloodthirsty) of (\"us\") all, such that we cannot say what happened.

This essay contributes to the ongoing dialogue concerning the traumatic breach and reach of the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. It dwells on the compromised construction of communities before and after the constitution of India and Pakistan by deliberating on the fundamental rhetorical ambiguity that haunts Partition literature and scholarship. The article examines an under- discussed aspect of Aijaz Ahmad’s famous riposte to Fredric Jameson’s “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”—specifically, the use of first-person plural pronouns in Ahmad’s exploration of Urdu literature—to argue that his rhetoric elides the division of Hindu and Muslim communities after independence. Insisting on the ambiguity that inflects Ahmad’s argument allows this essay to underscore the stakes of understanding Partition as an unsettling and disorienting event that defies closure. The article deploys the spectral concept of “haunting” to suggest the ways in which postcolonial scholars and literature mourn the loss of more composite communities before the fissures produced by Partition.