Saadat Hasan Manto and the erotic surface
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3528635 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Neetu Khanna (University of Southern California, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 1-19 |
| Publication date | 2025-08-05 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Interventions (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1369-801X • E-ISSN: 1469-929X |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/1369801x.2025.2483177 |
| OpenAlex | W4413029861 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 14 |
Urdu author Saadat Hasan Manto (1912–1955) was one of the most infamous and controversial figures of the Marxist Progressive Writers’ movement in India, deemed one of the great literary mavericks of his time as well as an enfant terrible known for his literary preoccupation with “perverse” sexuality and morbidity. This essay returns to one of Manto’s early experiments in the Urdu short story form entitled “Dhuan” or “Smoke,” a story for which Manto was tried for obscenity by the colonial government for its representation of adolescent male sexuality. I read “Dhuan” in relation to Manto’s more famous later stories written during the bloody aftermath of Partition in order to open up subtle phenomenological registers in his fiction that interrogate structures of masculinity constitutive of Indian nationalism. At the crux of my analytic is a set of relations between embodied experience and political consciousness as it emerges in Manto’s aesthetics, an unexplored dimension of anti-colonial humanist thought born in this moment during the global struggles for decolonization
Geometry · Islamic Studies and History · Mathematics · Middle East Politics and Society · Turkey's Politics and Society
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |