Havoc of Avenge and Lust on Female Body: Reading Manto’s short story Sharifan

 Abstract

This paper examines the gendered violence in partition through the lenses of the psychological construction of individual trauma and its effects on women. In addition, it will also interpret the cultural mediation of individual trauma and its outlet on the female body as discussed by Cathy Caruth, Gyanendra Pandey and Beerendra Pandey in their in-depth analyses of Partition trauma. The female body has always been the site of anger dumping organ and thus her body even after their death has to be a hunt for male’s evil taste. My study will critically examine the probable reasons behind violence on woman’s bodies during such atrocities in Sadaat Hasan Manto’s short partition story “Sharifan.”

Keywords : Partition, Gender Violence, Manto, Lust, Nationalism

Murder created Trauma, Trauma created anger, anger created a sense of revenge, the act of avenge created more murders, as a result, the violence never stopped. The trauma of violence continued to kill more and more people. Hatred increased at a community level like a pandemic of covid. Those who came in touch with victims also feel themselves victims and others as perpetrators through this social contact. The narrativization of trauma affected the whole community due to the absence of social distancing. The saddest element of this violent pandemic was that women were the major targets of an orgy of death.

The short story “Sharifan” written by Sadaat Hasan Manto stands as the perfect compact document of gendered violence in the period of partition. This story is not only a fiction of gender violence rather it also provokes to critically analyze the reason behind such pattern. One could on deep assessment see the male hegemony and its dirty outlook on females not as human but as bodies. The sexualization of the female body and the male’s opportunistic habit of waiting to pounce over the female body resembles the hungry predator in the jungle always ready for hunting on the slightest frame of chance. Violence has become able to project the dark psyche of males onto the surface time and again.  And partition no less than world war and holocaust still remains as one of the darkest examples.

“Shafiran” starts with the story of Qasim who is the father of teenage girl Shafiran. Qasim being raged on the death of his wife and daughter’s murder couldn’t digest the pain and instantly searches for revenge. But a film of crimson blood blinded him when he entered his house and saw his wife’s corpse (Shafiran 60). As a Muslim he immediately targets his Hindu and Sikh fellows. Blind with the trauma of his loss of a beautiful wife and daughter he goes hunting for murderers. Carrying ax in his hand and rotating it like the death wheel stumps upon whoever comes before him. Jisha Menon in “Rehearsing the Partition: Gendered Violence in "Aur Kitne Tukde" writes:

Official numbers of abducted women during Partition are 50,000 Muslim women in India and 33,000 Hindu and Sikh women in Pakistan. The multiple forms of sexual violence included inscribing tattoos on their bodies, parading them naked in sacred spaces like temples, mosques, gurudwaras, and cutting their breasts off. Sometimes families traded their women in exchange for freedom, at other times women were urged to take their own lives in order to protect communal 'honor.' (30)

Because of male lust and psychological suppression of sex, when the violence erupted females became the body to be relished, quenched, and torn into pieces. Partition of 1947 divided the society, brothers, and sisters into Hindu and Muslim but the female bodies. The case with the female body was based on the fact of sexuality and pleasure despite its religion, caste, and class. Such scenes of atrocities not only occurred and occur in one part of the world rather women's bodies were much tortured in every part of the world in the course of every conflict, war, and atrocity.

Urvashi Butalia in Other Side of Silence writes about the victimization of women during partition and discusses the casualties suffered by females, “The statistics inevitably used to open these accounts have changed little: around twelve million refugees, 1 million dead from slaughter, malnutrition, and disease, 75,000 women abducted and raped, thousands of families divided by new borders drawn on a map to represent the newly independent nations of India and Pakistan” (3). In another story “By God” Manto writes about old Muslim women tirelessly looking for her young daughter parted in Partition, “She was from Patiala. She had an only daughter whom she couldn’t find. Every effort was made to locate her, but with no luck. She was perhaps killed in the riots, but the old woman refused to accept that” (114). Her constant grief on losing her daughter nearly has made her go insane and go careless, insane about her own behavior.

Ranabir Samaddar in the introduction to the book Partitions sees partition as the occasion of “absence of apathy” for the people affected by it (2). Those deprived of the right to interpret and halt the partition are left unasked about their popular opinion. It works as the coercive force to suppress real victims of partition and performs as the goal for the policymakers to lay out their path for pertinent power and dominance. Dialogue to any kind of peaceful settlements and negotiations based on the interest of people are overlooked.

Though Qasim’s trauma is an immediate response to the pain arising from the death of his wife and the rape of his young daughter, scholars like Cathy Caruth define traumatic revenge as latency. In “Shfiran” the most prompt event leads to another catastrophe and results in the killings of Hindu and Sikh people. It slightly differs from the Cathy Caruth’s notion of medical trauma where the effects of violence emerge in the delayed time as the result of the inexpressible event during its occurrence. Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience trauma describes trauma as an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events, in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, and uncontrolled repetitive occurrence of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena (181).  Caruth interprets trauma from the delayed perspective of acute pain unexpressible during the time of the horrendous event. Differing from the opposite evocation of trauma Shafiran narrates the sudden rupture of violence blind on the anger of revenge: “Qasim felt shaken to the very core of his being. A scream, one that could rent the skies, emerged deep from within his innards but he had pursed his lips so tightly that it could not escape” (60). The long-term trauma is pathetic and makes one psychologically ill whereas such instant reaction and pain become more dangerous to those appearing as enemies and perpetrators for the cause but healing for future violence.

On believing that he has been the brutal target of religious outrage, Qasim projects his anger and guilty to the opposite of Muslim Hindu and Sikh: “Axe in hand he swept through the deserted bazaar like a stream of molten lava. He reached the chowk and came face to face with a Sikh. The Sikh was a tall strapping fellow but Qasim struck him down with such force that he fell like a tree uprooted in a fierce storm” (61). Jeffery C Alexander in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity writes “Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways (6). Similarly, the Hindu group also seems rampant causing violence all around streets and gullies against Muslims. The men saw him and raised cries of ‘Har Har Mahadev!’ Instead of responding with a slogan of his own, he spat out the worse mother-sister oaths he knew and pushed his way into them (Shafiran 61).  The violent clash between Muslims and Hindus emerge as the cultural mediation of individual trauma as pointed out by Beerendra Pandey “Cultural trauma emerges as the socially mediated attribution which emphasizes the representational aspect of culture” (125). Thus, the cultural transformation of individual trauma into communal violence is also necessarily showcased by Manto.

Qasim being a victim in the beginning couldn’t be identified as a

victim towards the end because of his incessant killing of Hindus and raping a Hindu girl Bimala who appears like his daughter’s age. Rada Ivekovic in “Partition as a form of transition” clarifies the dilemma of identifying the dichotomy of victims and perpetrators. She writes “People see themselves as victims regardless of the fact that they may have been or become perpetrators in their turn (30). Just after the event, Bimala’s father asks Qasim about his identity and starts rolling around the streets crying the name of Bimala soaked in immense pain perpetrated by Qasim.

According to Gyanendra Pandey, “Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus were all redefined by the process of Partition: as butchers, or as devious others; as untrustworthy and antinational; but perhaps most fundamentally, like Sikhs and Muslims and Hindus alone (16). The new construction of identity altered the people of any religion in bloody vampires thirsty to kill and live on the flesh of the other. Irritable and dissatisfied, he walked towards a house whose doorway had something written over it in Hindi (Shafiran 62). Qasim’s alternation into the devourer of Hindu flesh blurs all the realities of religion and religious morality of his own religion. Pandey further adds “rape abduction and killing' were the chief constituents of partition” (62). Qasim voraciously goes to rape Bimala forgetting the pain and suffering of his own daughter. She was barely fourteen or fifteen years old. He dropped the ax from his hand. Like a falcon, he pounced upon the girl and shoved her into the verandah (62). The violent acting out of mourning of his daughter changes him into a perpetrator. Frances Harrison in view of medico eruption of individual trauma contrastingly views focusing on the psychological motivation behind an individual perpetrator of violence (95). The unsolvability of the brutal killings led to more killings reordering the line of friend and foe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

Alexander, Jeffrey. Trauma: A Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.

Bianchini, et al. Partitions: Reshaping States and Minds. London: Routledge, 2005.

Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. New Delhi: Penguin, 1998.

Caruth, Cathy. “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History.” Yale French Studies, no. 79, 1991, pp. 181–192. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2930251. Accessed 2 July 2020.

Harrison, Frances. “Literary Representation: Partition in Indian and Pakistani Novels in English.” Indian Literature, vol. 34, no. 5 (145), 1991, pp. 94–110. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23336961. Accessed 29 June 2020.

Menon, Jisha. “Rehearsing the Partition: Gendered Violence in ‘Aur Kitne Tukde.’” Feminist Review, no. 84, 2006, pp. 29–47. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30232738. Accessed 2 July 2020.

Pandey, Beerendra. Pedagogy of Indian Partition Literature in the Light of Trauma Theory. Southern Postcolonialisms: The Global South and the ‘New’ Literary Representations. Ed. Sumanyu Satpathy. London: Routledge, 2009. 124-138.

Pandey, Gyanendra. Remembering Partition Violence, Nationalism and History in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.