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Like a Broken Pebble from the Pavement — Two Readings on Subalternity and the Woman Condition in Saadat Hasan Manto's “The Insult” (1948)
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Like a Broken Pebble from the Pavement — Two Readings on Subalternity and the Woman Condition in Saadat Hasan Manto's “The Insult” (1948)
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Journal Article
Like a Broken Pebble from the Pavement — Two Readings on Subalternity and the Woman Condition in Saadat Hasan Manto's “The Insult” (1948)
2018
Overview
Manto's writings are hardly as controversial and ground-breaking as his series of short stories about Bombay's prostitutes and the world surrounding them. My paper aims to give at least two readings of the story of Saugandhi and “the insult” she receives when being rejected by a client. Her burst of pent-up rage, helpless but terrible, can be interpreted either as a positive act of realization of her own condition or as a reaffirmation of powerlessness in the face of the dominant. Using the tools of the canonic and original concept of the subaltern, with Gramsci (1916) and Spivak (1985) delimiting its oppressed (non)identity, Saugandhi's consciousness of herself becomes the voice which the subaltern cannot utter. Manto's essays (1955) show major concern with the desperate state of sexual workers, and it is through his feminism that this paper will discard the abstract notion of subalternity and highlight how gender makes “the woman who didn't have a father's shelter, had no education, ...a broken pebble from the pavement” (Manto, 2014: 204). The short story is not, as it may seem in abstract terms, empowering; it is a wretched cry that ends in silence —there is nothing to be done.
La producción más controvertida y revolucionaria de Manto es sin lugar a dudas su serie de cuentos en torno a las prostitutas de Bombay y del mundo en el que viven. Mi ensayo pretende ofrecer dos lecturas de la historia de Saugandhi y de su reacción ante “el insulto” que recibe al ser rechazada por un cliente. Su enorme ira, desesperada y terrible, puede ser interpretada como una liberación, al reconocer su estatus, o como una reafirmación de su lugar de sumisión. La reacción airada de Saugandhi se convierte a través de la óptica de Gramsci (1916) y Spivak (1985) en la posible voz de la subalterna. La preocupación de Manto en sus ensayos (1955) en relación con el estado deplorable de las trabajadoras sexuales va a ser el catalizador para entender la experiencia de Saugandhi no como una victoria abstracta de cualquier subalterna/o sino como una víctima de su género, porque “la mujer que no tuvo la protección del padre, que no tuvo educación, es como una piedra rota en la calzada” (Manto, 2014a: 204). El cuento no es empoderador como inicialmente podría parecer, es un grito desesperado que muere en silencio; no hay nada que hacer.
Publisher
Indialogs,Indi@logs. Spanish Journal of India Studies,Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Subject
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