Woman in Decolonization

Woman in Decolonization: The

National and Textual Politics of
Rape in Saadat Hasan Manto and
Mahasweta Devi

Harveen Sachdeva Mann

Loyola University, Chicago, USA

In two recent essays, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak articulates the negative

link between nation(alism) and gender thus:
Women can be ventriloquists, but they have an immense historical potential
of not being (allowed to remain) nationalists; of knowing, in their gendering,
that nation and identity are commodities in the strictest sense: something
made for [(neo)colonial] exchange. And that they are the medium of that
exchange.
and,
[I]n a critique of metropolitan culture, the event of political independence
can be automatically assumed to stand in-between colony and decolonization
as an unexamined good that operates a reversal. But... there is always a

space [ that of the subproletariat or the subaltern - ] that cannot share in

-

the energy of this reversal.... [E]ven within this space, the woman’s body
is the last instance, it is elsewhere.’

My article locates itself at the cusp of these third-world feminist, post-

structuralist observations of Spivak to uncover the portrayal of the
&dquo;displaced space&dquo; of the modern South Asian woman in selected short
fiction by the Urdu Pakistani writer Saadat Hasan Manto and the Bengali
Indian writer Mahasweta Devi.2Focussing on Manto’s stories &dquo;Colder than
Ice&dquo; (&dquo;Thanda Gosht,&dquo; literally translated as &dquo;Cold Meat&dquo;) (1949) and
&dquo;The Return&dquo; (&dquo;Khol Do,&dquo; literally &dquo;Open Up&dquo;) (1950) and Mahasweta’s
&dquo;Dhowli&dquo; (1979) and &dquo;The Funeral Wailer&dquo; (&dquo;Rudali&dquo;) (1979), I specifically
investigate the contrastive function of female rape in the two authors: as a
metaphor of the nation-as-despoiled woman in Manto and as literal physical
and sexual violation in post-Independence India in Mahasweta. Such a
 128

comparative reading also underlines the contrapuntal significance of the

discourse of sexual violence in the two pairs of stories as it points up
the sensationalization and reification of female victimization in Manto
on the one hand and the emphasis on female self-fashioning and agency in
Mahasweta on the other.

The Gendered Rape of the National &dquo;Body&dquo;

Born in Samrala in Punjab in 1912, Manto, a Muslim, lived in Amritsar
until 1936, when he moved to Bombay to write for films. In 1948, soon
after India’s partition, he emigrated to Pakistan where he died in 1955. The
author of more than 200 stories and dozens of essays and plays, he is best
known for his partition stories in which he attempts to answer the following
questions:
Now that we were free, had subjection ceased to exist? Who would be our
slaves? When we were colonial subjects, we could dream of freedom, but
now that we were free, what would our dreams be? Were we even free?....

India was free. Pakistan was free.... But man was a slave in both countries,
of prejudice, of religious fanaticism, of bestiality, of cruelty.3

As the above quotation demonstrates, even as he problematizes Indian

and Pakistani &dquo;freedom&dquo;, Manto subsumes the politics of gender under the
mantle of a singular, masculinized discourse of post-Independence slavery-
in-nationalism. Not only that, but his critics, both approbatory and disappro-
batory, also neglect to examine Manto’s subscription to a patriarchal nation-
based politics as evidenced by his construction of the raped and silent
woman-as-signifier of &dquo;man’s&dquo; enslavement to &dquo;prejudice, religious fanati-
cism, bestiality, cruelty&dquo;. For example, such scholars as Leslie Fleming and
Khalid Hasan focus on the formal characteristics of Manto’s stories to
praise him for his &dquo;powerful&dquo;, &dquo;moving&dquo;, and &dquo;masterful portrait[s]&dquo;
&dquo;expressing the human pain of partition&dquo;, for writing with &dquo;detachment
and passion&dquo;, &dquo;deep irony and humanism&dquo; about the communal holocaust,
in short for creating &dquo;great literature&dquo;; while many of his most vociferous
critics from amongst the Progressive Writers Movement denounce his work
as obscene and cynical But even as the latter condemn Manto for being

&dquo;perversely&dquo; &dquo;preoccupied with the world of the socially wronged and

sexually exploited woman&dquo;,5they fail to investigate the androcentrism
underlying his construction of the sexually oppressed - and hence, according
to Manto, silenced and virtually erased - woman as a cultural signifier of
the politico-social violations of partition in his overwhelmingly &dquo;male&dquo;
narratives.6 As a stand-in for the macropolitical rape of the &dquo;body&dquo; of India
and Pakistan, the raped woman is written into the patriarchal national
narrative not to thematize her own suffering but merely to signify the
 129

(generalized) horrors of partition. Thus, in being constructed as the object

of sexual violence, the female victim is assaulted not only as body but also,
and perhaps more importantly, as subject, for, as Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
notes in her study of gender and postcolonial culture:

[paradoxically, at the same time that she becomes an existential cypher the
raped woman also turns into a symbolic cause. She becomes the representa-
tive of her social group, the very embodiment of its collective identity....
The woman’s newly recognized identity - which may be more properly
described as her function in an economy of sexual propriety and property -
becomes an emotional war-cry and the prelude to the virtual disappearance
of the concerns of the woman herself?7

As Manto says in another context in his essay &dquo;Safed Jhut&dquo; (&dquo;White

Lie&dquo;), &dquo;I am a man who ... writes because he has something to say. What-
ever I see, the way and the angle I see it from, I present it to others in that

very way and angle.&dquo;8 It is this &dquo;way and angle&dquo; of Manto’s &dquo;seeing&dquo; of
woman’s &dquo;essential&dquo; vulnerability and silence that underlies what Lynn
Higgins and Brenda Silver define generally as the &dquo;ambivalence&dquo; of male
texts of female rape that elide the scene of violence. Yet such an elision
also marks the poststructural &dquo;subversive presence&dquo; or &dquo;gap&dquo; that provides
us &dquo;a space to speak of women’s violation and subjectivity&dquo;.9 Additionally,
while it is undeniable that women are raped, tortured, and murdered during
communal conflict and war, to represent them only as the targets of physical
violence is to deny them agency, roles of resistance, and their very voices.
While during periods of ethnic/national conflict, gender too often becomes
a &dquo;symbolic marker... separating ‘selffrom ’other&dquo;’, as Barbara Einhorn

correctly points out, wherein &dquo;women’s bodies become the symbolic and
actual stage upon which conflict is acted out&dquo;, to represent women only in
national-metaphoric terms is to neglect the &dquo;real consequences&dquo; of
nationalism for women and to fail to ask that most significant question,
&dquo;How can women subvert these [national] processes... [and] reject the
unitary identity imposed on them by others, defending the possibility of
self-identification in terms of multiple identities?&dquo;10

&dquo;Colder than Ice&dquo;

Manto’s much discussed story &dquo;Colder than Ice&dquo; is the retrospective death-
bed narrative of a Sikh man, Ishar Singh. As he lies dying of a fatal stab
wound made by his jealous mistress Kalwant Kaur, he recounts his role in
the material, sexual, and human atrocities of partition: following eight days
of looting Muslim shops and homes, he murders six male members of a
Muslim family and abducts the sole female of the household; only after he
rapes her does he realize that she is dead, &dquo;a heap of cold flesh&dquo;, a
 130

realization that leads to his impotence. And at the narrative’s end, having
told his chilling tale, he is himself near death, &dquo;colder than ice&dquo; (p. 124).
Now regarded as one of Manto’s technical masterpieces, &dquo;Colder than
Ice&dquo; was, however, denounced for &dquo;obscenity&dquo; by many of his contempor-
aries, a charge which Manto answers thus:
The story seemingly revolves around one aspect of sexual psychology, but,
in fact, in it an extremely subtle message is given to man, that, even at the
last limits of cruelty and violence, of barbarity and bestiality, he still does
not lose his humanity! If Ishar Singh had completely lost his humanity, the
touch of the dead woman would not have affected him so violently as to
strip him of his manhood.’1
My reading of &dquo;Colder than Ice&dquo; critiques Manto’s masculinist fictive
and interpretive stance in which he not only casts the dead woman as the
bodily site upon which the &dquo;cruelty, barbarity and bestiality&dquo; of nationalist
discourse is emplotted but also positions her as the vehicle for Ishar Singh’s
new-found and (ostensibly) praiseworthy &dquo;humanity&dquo;. In this male narrative
of the nation, the raped woman is denied a name, a voice, subjectivity, even
life. Entrapped in this patriarchal story of partition, she is represented only
as a permanently silent, sexualized body, a &dquo;thing&dquo; that Ishar Singh &dquo;hides
from&dquo; Kalwant Kaur, a &dquo;mouthful of luscious fruit&dquo; that he - using the
language of power and conquest - &dquo;decide[s] to trump right away&dquo;, a &dquo;dead
body ... a heap of cold flesh&dquo; (pp. 123-4).
Even Kalwant Kaur, cast as the dead woman’s sexual adversary, and a
seemingly strong female character who is painfully alive at the narrative’s
end, remains secondary to the &dquo;male&dquo; plot of partition politics. The growth
of Ishar Singh’s &dquo;humanity&dquo;, a symbol of a &dquo;universal&dquo; hope amidst the
horrors of 1947, remains the crux of the story, whereas Kalwant Kaur
supports his development both sexually and textually. Cast in sexually
overdeternnined imagery - described by the (masculinist) narrator as &dquo;a big
woman with generous hips, fleshy thighs and unusually high breasts&dquo;, a
&dquo;flirt&dquo; and a &dquo;coquette&dquo;, a woman who &dquo;boil[s] with passion like a kettle
on high fire&dquo; (pp. 119-22) - Kalwant Kaur not only reenacts stereotypical

male typologies of the Punjabi Sikh woman, but she is also depicted as the
&dquo;cause&dquo; of Ishar Singh’s murderous appetite for the Muslim woman -
&dquo;Ishar Sian, you gorge yourself on Kalwant Kaur every day ... how about
a mouthful of this luscious fruit&dquo;, says Ishar Singh (p. 124) - and thus sets
in motion his (paradoxical) ascent to &dquo;humanity&dquo;. In addition, her narrative
function as impetus and audience for Ishar Singh’s confessional story -
&dquo;Jani, what’s wrong?&dquo; she asks (p. 120), thereby prompting his cathartic
account - further marks her as a rhetorical ploy in the male nationalist and
cultural plot.
 131

&dquo;The Return&dquo;

Similarly, Manto’s story &dquo;The Return&dquo; is a third person, male-focussed

account, this time of a Muslim man, Sirajuddin’s attempts to find his seven-
teen-year-old daughter, Sakina, from whom he has become separated
following an attack on their Lahore-bound train. The eight men he recruits
to cross the border into India after partition and find his daughter end up
abducting and gang-raping her, as the chilling end of the narrative reveals.
Coming upon Sakina’s unconscious body, Sirajuddin thinks his prayers have
been answered, but as the attendant doctor asks him to &dquo;open up&dquo; the
window, the now semi-conscious Sakina &dquo;groped for the cord which kept
her shalwar tied round her waist. With painful slowness, she unfastened it,
pulled the garment down and opened her thighs&dquo; (p. 38).12
Generally, the story has been praised as one that plumbs the &dquo;human
pain of partition&dquo; and &dquo;explores with a remarkable combination of anger,
sarcasm and tenderness the effects of the violence and dislocation of its

victims&dquo;, or criticized for &dquo;its intention to shock the reader [through

Sakina’s rape] rather than to generate sympathy for Siraj-ud-din&dquo; and thus
for its failure to &dquo;provide a deeply felt, realistic, or universalized version
of the Partition experience&dquo;.&dquo; In both cases, we once more find the critics
falling in line behind Manto, privileging and valorizing his masculine cri-
tiques of the nascent project of Indian and Pakistani nationalist modernity
and neglecting to investigate his reliance upon representations of sexual
violence against women to forward his nation-based criticism.
My reading of &dquo;The Return&dquo; responds to Higgins and Silver’s challenge
to &dquo;listen to ... [those] who do not speak ...
[to] recuperate what has too
often been left out: the physical violation&dquo; of women. 14 Like the dead
woman in &dquo;Colder than Ice&dquo;, Sakina is positioned as a silent and absent

presence in much of the narrative. She is cast as &dquo;essentially&dquo; vulnerable

on the basis of her sexuality: Sirajuddin describes her as &dquo;fair, very

pretty.... About seventeen. Big eyes, black hair, a mole on the left cheek&dquo;,
thereby arousing her would-be rescuers’ desire for her body; while the
Manto-like narrator notes that &dquo;it was obvious that she was ill-at-ease
without her dupatta [veil], trying nervously to cover her breasts with her
arms&dquo; (pp. 36, 37). Sexualized thus, her repeated rape signified at the
narrative’s end for its shock value, Sakina too is reduced to a metaphor of
the horrors of partition, her story of violation curtailed and exploited so
that the story of the nation can be enunciated. 15
Even as he denounces the macrocosmic corruptions of the new nations
of Pakistan and India, Manto thus remains complicit with patriarchal cul-
tural as well as textual structures. And even as he champions the role of
the writer as social critic - as distinguished from that of social reformer -
he remains rooted within a masculine sexual sphere, a proponent of a male-
 132

gendered social realist stance in literature, as he ironically reveals in the

metaphor of female undress that he adopts in an address to a college
audience: &dquo;I am not seditious. I do not want to stir up people’s ideas and
feelings. If I take off the blouse of culture and society, then it is naked. I
do not try to put clothes back on, because that is not my job&dquo;. 16

&dquo;Crossing the Sezual Differential:&dquo; Female Subjectivity and Agency

In his book The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial His-
tories, Partha Chatterjee articulates the symbiotic relationship of elite and
subaltern, constitutional and populist or communitarian Indian national
politics, and concludes that &dquo;[n]ow the task is to trace in their mutually
conditioned historicities the specific forms that have appeared, on the one
hand, in the domain defined by the hegemonic project of nationalist mod-
ernity, and on the other, in the numerous fragmented resistances to that
normalizing project&dquo;. 17 Whereas Saadat Hasan Manto can be regarded as
engaging with the corruptions inherent in &dquo;the hegemonic project of
nationalist modernity&dquo;, Mahasweta Devi can be seen as focussing on the
&dquo;fragmented resistance&dquo; mounted by low-caste women and disenfranchized
tribals generally to the dominant, Brahminic discourse of Indian
nationalism.
In contrast to Manto and his masculinist narrativization of the Indian
and Pakistani nations stands Mahasweta, fiction writer, investigative
journalist, editor of a &dquo;people’s&dquo; magazine, and social activist, who fore-
grounds a resistant, feminist politics-in-decolonization, as exemplified in
her stories &dquo;Dhowli&dquo; and &dquo;The Funeral Wailer&dquo;, which overturns Manto’s
metaphoric casting of the raped woman as a stand-in for a corrupt
nationality. Born in 1926, Mahasweta moved in the 1940’s from East to
West Bengal, where she has lived and worked amongst the disenfranchized
tribal and outcaste communities, writing particularly about how tribal low-
caste women are exploited in post-independence India. Products of a tribal
culture in which women hold a place of honour, rape is virtually unknown
and considered a grave crime, the system of bride-price rather than dowry
is sanctioned, and widow remarriage is customary, low-caste women are
raped and brutalized by dominant Hindus in an India that denies them the
basic rights of citizenship. As Mahasweta points out, &dquo;They are Indians
who belong to the rest of India. Mainstream India had better recognize
that. Pay them the honour that they deserve. Pay them the respect that
they deserve.&dquo;1$ And give them the constitutional rights of fair represen-
tation and protection from crime which are theirs by birth, one might
add. For among the more heinous corruptions arising from caste-linked,
communal, patriarchal Indian national politics is the frequently unpunished
-

and, in fact, too often abetted - violence done to low-caste women.

 133

Abducted and prostituted to repay their fathers’ or husbands’ loans from

upper-caste money-lenders, sold for purposes of rape, such women are, in
Mahasweta’s words, &dquo;just merchandise, commodities&dquo;.19
But, even as she claims a national currency for some of her female
characters - for example, Stanadayini, a mother-by-hire, is described by her
as a &dquo;parable of India after decolonization&dquo;, and the case of Douloti, a
bonded prostitute who dies of venereal disease, is exemplified as &dquo;true for
the rest of India.... [Douloti’s] bleeding, rotting carcass covers the entire
Indian peninsula&dquo;~° - even as she underlines the generalized significance of
her characters, Mahasweta focuses on the very real sufferings and fortitude
of individual women so that rape in her stories resists being read merely
as an allegory of national politics. Thus, as Spivak points out, in Mahasweta’s

story &dquo;Douloti the Bountiful&dquo;, the &dquo;Aufhebung of colony into nation is

undone by the figuration of the woman’s body before the affective coding
of sexuality&dquo;, so that &dquo;such a globalization of douloti, dissolving even the
proper name, is not an overcoming of the gendered body&dquo;.21 In writing
the feminine sexual difference of rape into her stories, therefore, Mahasweta
reinscribes a subjectivity and agency for the mute, metaphorized female
victim of androcentric fictions such as Manto’s. As Spivak notes in her
commentary on another of Mahasweta’s stories, &dquo;Draupadi&dquo; (1978), &dquo;It is
when [Mahasweta’s female protagonist] crosses the sexual differential into
the field of what could only happen to a woman that she emerges as the
most powerful ’subject,’... whom the author can describe as a terrifying
superobject in the... section of the story... of lunar flux and sexual
...

difference, she is in a place where she will finally act for herself&dquo;.22

&dquo;Dhowli&dquo;

&dquo;Dhowli&dquo; tells the story of a young outcaste Dusad widow’s sexual liaison
with her Brahman landlord’s son. Yet here the rape of &dquo;the Dhowlis of the
world&dquo; by high-caste men is initially figured as love, and Misrilal proposes
marriage to Dhowli, convinced that their union will be &dquo;all right by the
government rules&dquo;. But, as Dhowli retorts, &dquo;The laws are not for people
like US’l.23 The remainder of the narrative presents an extended commentary
on the disenfranchizement of the low-caste woman, her powerless position

unchanged in post-independence India. Abandoned by her lover, Dhowli

also becomes an outcaste among her own people precisely because her
&dquo;rape&dquo; is no literal rape, because &dquo;she gave herself to him of her own
accord, out of love&dquo; (p. 193). Reduced to prostitution in order to support
her young son, her ageing mother, and herself, Dhowli is eventually driven
out of the village because she has brought &dquo;dishonor&dquo; to the Brahmans by
allowing the &dquo;entrance that was once used by a lion&dquo; to be &dquo;used by the
pigs and the sewer rats&dquo; (p. 203).
 134

But even though the narrative’s end disperses Dhowli into the figure of
all exploited low-caste women - &dquo;Has nature then accepted the disgracing
of the Dhowlis as a matter of course?&dquo; asks the narrator (p. 205) - even
though the narrative represents Dhowli as a collective metaphor of the
subaltern woman’s powerlessness in the modern Indian nation, the majority
of the story traces Dhowli, the individual woman’s attempts to survive.
Overturning conventional desire-based male representations of the nation-
as-chaste-woman as well as of the mythical love that underwrites the Hindu
national imaginary, Dhowli proposes rape, recognized and compensated as
such, as a preferred script for the low-caste woman in modern India’
Subverting the secular-national notion of intercaste &dquo;love&dquo;, she retorts to
Misrilal, &dquo;I spit on your love&dquo;; &dquo;[i]f you had raped me, then I would have
received a tenth of an acre as compensation. You are not a man&dquo; (p. 199).
Resisting the impulse to locate herself in the position of victim, she also
actively rejects the option of aborting her baby, electing to raise her son
even in the face of extreme material deprivation. Finally, challenging tra-
ditional sexual morality, which regards chastity as a woman’s most cherished
possession, she chooses to live as a prostitute rather than to die because of
her sexual &dquo;dishonor&dquo;. &dquo;At first I wanted to [kill myself],&dquo; she confesses to
Misrilal; &dquo;[t]hen I thought, why should I die? You’ll marry, run your shop,
go to the cinema with your wife, and I’ll be the one to die. Why?&dquo; (p. 204).
Dhowli’s interrogative &dquo;Why?&dquo; signals more than merely her rhetorical
question addressed to Misrilal: it is directed as well at the dominant reader,
undercutting his/her complicity in the caste-based, gendered ideology of
the &dquo;Hindu&dquo; nation, India, and pointing up Mahasweta’s subversion of such
ideology at the level of narrative strategy as well as of content. Incisive,
insistent, ironic questions dot Mahasweta’s story, forcing the reader to
abandon a position of aesthetic distance and to confront the material
specificity of Dhowli’s oppression. &dquo;What does she think? An untouchable,
Dusad girl can make a Brahman give her home and food?&dquo; asks one
villager; &dquo;[h]ave they left untouched any young girl of the Dusads, the
Dhobis, the Ganjus of the village?&dquo; queries another (pp. 186, 187). And
to the Brahman Hanuman Misra’s questions, &dquo;Why can’t he
&dquo;patriarch&dquo;,
[Misrilal] come to his home, his own village? For fear of a Dusad girl?
What can she do?&dquo; (p. 197), Mahasweta replies with counter-questions
framed by Dhowli, as well as those posed by the narrator to the reader:
&dquo;Why did you destroy me like this?&dquo; asks Dhowli of Misrilal; whereas the
reader’s distanced spectatorship is shattered by a barrage of rhetorical
questions in mid-narrative - &dquo;When he [Misrilal] comes back to the village
after his wedding [to a high-caste woman], will he be moved to pity on
seeing his boy? Will he give a bit of land to help his child live?&dquo; - as well
as at the narrative’s end - &dquo;Has nature then accepted the disgracing of the
Dhowlis as a matter of course? Has nature too gotten used to the Dhowlis
 135

being branded as whores and forced to leave home? Or is it that even the
earth and the sky and the trees, the nature that was not made by the Misras,
have now become their private property?&dquo; (pp. 197, 198, 205).
It is not only through such trenchant questions that Mahasweta points
up the material basis of sexual violence; she also translates sexual into
textual difference in several other ways: by creating a low-caste, raped/
&dquo;loved&dquo; woman as the eponymous subject of the narrative; by maintaining
the narrative focus on Dhowli; by explicitly rendering the &dquo;love&dquo; scene
between Dhowli and Misrilal at the centre of the story in order to trace its
devastating effect upon Dhowli in the remainder of the narrative; by sket-
ching in some detail the scenes of rape/prostitution that she has to endure
following her abandonment by Misrilal; and by punctuating the action with
feminist commentary on Dhowli’s survival and resistance as much as on
her exploitation. And it is by paying close attention to such narrative
strategies as well as to the content of Mahasweta’s stories that the reader
can complement the author’s feminist appropriation of narrative means
with a resistant mode of reading.25

&dquo;The Funeral Wailer&dquo;

As Dhowli leaves Tahad for Ranchi to set herself up an an urban prostitute,

she muses, albeit somewhat sardonically, that &dquo;now she is going to be a
whore by occupation. She is going to be one of many whores, a member
of a part of society. Isn’t the society more powerful than the individual?&dquo;
(p. 205). As if in earnest answer to this question, Mahasweta’s &dquo;The Funeral
Wailer&dquo; offers an account of Sanichari, the Ganju woman’s organizing of
prostitutes as funeral wailers. Raped and reduced by Rajput landlords and
creditors to market-place prostitutes, these tribal and low-caste women are
offered a means of material sustenance as well as resistance by Sanichari’s
funeral wailing business. Convinced that &dquo;the most important criterion
distinguishing virtue from sin was whether it helped put food in hungry
stomachs&dquo;,26 Sanichari unites the prostitutes not on the basis of their shared
oppression but in more resistant ideological fashion, as she proposes a
specifically feminist mode of action, reliant upon the collective strength of
the women’s group:

&dquo;Gambhir Singh is dying. Cry for him, and take money for crying. Nothing
to be embarrassed about. Don’t miss your chance to rub salt in their face
and take whatever revenge you can. Let’s go now. Each will get five
rupees and rice, and clothing on the day of the kiriya [funeral].&dquo;
There was excitement and scrambling around her. The younger whores
came up to her and asked what about them. Sanichari said that they could
come too.... Everybody was curiously happy and excited....

Gambhir Singh’s nephew and all the others assembled there were stunned
136

to see the battalion arrive with Sanichari. The account keeper hissed at her,
&dquo;Brought the entire randitoli [band of prostitutes] along? Nearly a hundred
of them!&dquo;
&dquo;Why not?&dquo; she asked loudly for all to hear. &dquo;Didn’t the malik [master]
want the wailing at his funeral to be so spectacular that it would become a
legend? How can a legend be made with some ten wailers? Get out of our
way now; let us start our work. The malik now belongs to us.&dquo; (p. 228)

It is significant that, after having been &dquo;owned&dquo; by the Rajputs for over
two hundred years - a history of oppression recounted at some length by
the character Dulan in &dquo;The Funeral Wailer&dquo; - in Mahasweta’s story the
tribals and untouchables of Tohri revolt not through armed uprising or
electoral ballot but through the &dquo;domestic&dquo; organization of women as
funeral wailers. As Sanichari leads her group to countless kiriyas, she
displays an unprecedented resolve; convinced that &dquo;transferring some of
[the] money [of the wealthy] to those like [herself] was not at all a bad
thing&dquo;, she bargains hard for her group, and.her &dquo;clients generally had no
choice but to accept [her] terms&dquo; (p. 219). But while the funeral wailing
business is materially important as it becomes a &dquo;career&dquo; for Sanichari as
well as her friend Bikhni, her most notable accomplishment is that she
transforms &dquo;whores [who] were not a caste apart... [but] only women
whom the landlords and creditors had used and discarded&dquo; into women who
knowingly &dquo;take whatever revenge [they] can&dquo; against the maliks (pp. 219,
222, 228). It is thus that Sanichari can truly claim on behalf of her whole
community, &dquo;The malik now belongs to us&dquo; (p. 228).
Displacing the economy of socially-sanctioned rape violence against
prostitutes with the gendered labour power of funeral wailers, Mahasweta
disrupts as well the male idealization of the female body as a sexualized and
privatized object. And as she sunders the nationalist ideological construct
of &dquo;India&dquo; as the chaste, asexual, goddess-mother through her realistic
representation of the rape and exploitation as well as resistance of indi-
vidual women, she also employs a narrative strategy that challenges
patriarchal textual models that reify female victimization and reduce the
violated woman to a symbolical cause. As Rajeswari Sunder Rajan says
in another context of the Tamil writer Anuradha Ramanan, Mahasweta
&dquo;reconstitutes... the female subject of rape&dquo; in a feminist textual space in
numerous ways:
by representing the raped woman as one who becomes a subject through
rape rather than merely one subjected to its violation; by structuring a
post-rape narrative that traces her strategies of survival instead of a rape-
centred narrative that privileges chastity and leads inexorably to &dquo;trials&dquo; to
establish it; by locating the raped woman in structures of oppression other
than heterosexual &dquo;romantic&dquo; relationships; by literalizing instead of mysti-
fying the representation of rape; and, finally, by counting the cost of rape
 137

for its victims in terms more complex than the extinction of female selfhood
in death or silence 2’

addition, naming her female characters - bonded labourers, mis-

In
prostitutes, widows - whether Dhowli, Sanichari, Bikhni, Motia,
tresses,
Gulbadan, Rupa, Budhni, Somri, or Gangu; announcing their tribal and
caste affiliation, whether Dusad, Dhobi, or Ganju; giving them a voice
and establishing them as narrative focalizers; in short, writing their lives in
meticulous detail in all their circumscriptions and subversions, as well as
living and working with them, Mahasweta creates the bases for political
action on behalf of and by such women.
Thus, while Manto metaphorizes the violence of rape to mark the
crisis of the nationalisms of Pakistan and India, thereby erasing female
subjectivity, Mahasweta writes the violated female body back not only into
the literary but also into the politico-cultural text. Breaking out of the
desire/guilt narrative bind of the conventional rape narrative, what Terry
Eagleton regards as the unrepresentability of rape, of the &dquo;pleasure of
mastery and possession over the ’passive’ text in reading&dquo; and of &dquo;narra-
tive’s very trajectory, its movement towards closure which traverses the
feminine as object, obstacle, or space&dquo;,28 Mahasweta has fashioned resilient
female selfhood in her stories. Furthermore, she has organized tribal
women; advocated marches on government offices to protest oppression;
helped establish schools, primary health care facilities, and small-scale
industries in rural areas; and written investigative journalistic pieces to
expose exploitation. So it is that even as we look to Mahasweta for her
writing of a subjectivity for the raped/violated woman, for displacing the
feminized, metaphorized nation with the sympathetic stories of resistant,
individual female citizens of the nation, even as we examine the feminist
theoretical position of her texts, we do so with an eye to her materialist,
activist engagement with tribal women; even as we raise questions of her
woman-centred poetics, we look beyond textuality to the politico-cultural
realm, beyond &dquo;the library&dquo; to &dquo;the street&dquo;.29

NOTES
1 Spivak, "Acting Bits/Identity Talk", Critical Inquiry, 18, 4 (1992), 803; and
"Woman in Difference: Mahasweta Devi’s ’Douloti the Bountiful", National-
isms and Sexualities, eds. Andrew Parker et al., New York: Routledge, 1992, pp.
97-8. Other key works dealing with the symbolical construction of (female)
gender in nationalist discourse include Anne McClintock, et al ., Dangerous
Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1997; Parker ., ; Deniz Kandiyoti, Women,
et al op. cit
passim
.,
Islam, and the State, Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1991; Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya
Anthias, eds., Woman, Nation, State, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989; and
Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, New Delhi:
Kali for Women, 1986.
138

2 I have chosen to analyse works by a Pakistani and an Indian writer in an

examination of nation and rape in South Asian literary discourse because it is
quite clear that the history of twentieth-century subcontinental nationalism
cannot be studied without reference to the intertwined histories of India and
Pakistan (and more latterly Bangladesh). Three additional reasons inform my
choice of authors: first, the very concept of modern nationhood was bequeathed
by the British colonizers to both India and Pakistan simultaneously; second,
both of Manto’s stories under discussion deal with partition, an event shared
equally by India and Pakistan, the violence of which begot the latter country
and changed the contours of the former’s map forever; and third, Mahasweta
originally hails from East Bengal, which, at the time of partition, became part
of Pakistan - East Pakistan - and in 1972, following a revolution aided by India,
became the independent nation of Bangladesh.
Further, although a consideration of the politics and methodology of the
translations of Manto’s and Mahasweta’s works from Urdu and Bengali into
English respectively is beyond the scope of this article, I point the reader to
the following pertinent works that deal with translations of Mahasweta’s works,
with comparative literature and translations of Indian languages, and with
translation studies generally: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Translator’s
Preface" and "Afterword", in Mahasweta Devi, Imaginary Maps: Three Stories,
New York: Routledge, 1995, pp. xxiii-xxx, 197-205; and Outside in the Teaching
Machine, New York: Routledge, 1993; Amiya Dev, The Idea of Comparative
Literature in India, Calcutta: Papyrus, 1984; Sisir Kumar Das and Amiya Dev,
eds., Comparative Literature: Theory and Practice, Shimla: Indian Institute of
Advanced Study, 1989; K. Ayyappa Paniker, Spotlight on Comparative Indian
Literature, Calcutta: Papyrus, 1992; Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefevere, eds.,
Translation, History, and Culture, London: Pinter, 1990; Andre Lefevere, Trans-
lating Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context,
New York: Modern Language Association, 1992; and Rainer Schulte and John
Biguenet, eds., Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden
, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
to Derrida
3 Manto, Kingdom’s End and Other Stories, trans. Khalid Hasan, London: Verso,
1987, p. 6. All subsequent references to Manto’s stories are to this edition and
cited in the text.
are
4 Fleming, "Riots and Refugees: The Post-Partition Stories of Saadat Hasan
Manto", Journal of South Asian Literature 13, 1-4 (1977-8), 106; and Hasan,
"Introduction", Manto, op. cit., p. 8. While Manto was himself associated with
the Progressive Writers Movement between 1934 and 1936, he was ousted
by the other members for his "reactionary" views. As Mahnaz Ispahani points
out, while the literary Left initially embraced Manto for his realistic and politi-
cally engaged writing, it cast him out for being "obsessed with the abnormal
and obscene" and for "only reflect[ing] what he saw" rather than working for
the amelioration of economic and social ills. "Saadat Hasan Manto", Grand
Street 7, 4 (1988), 190.
5 Ahmed Ali, quoted in Leslie Fleming, Another Lonely Voice: Life and Works
of Saadat Hasan Manto, Lahore: Vanguard Books, 1985, p. 29.
6 In more recent times, a critic like Mahnaz Ispahani has faulted Manto for
depicting physically and psychologically scarred women, who are "almost always
victims" and whose "fate" is linked to their "sexual vulnerability". Yet even
Ispahani, as if to rescue Manto from himself, concludes only that while "Manto’s
prose is obsessed with women", Manto the writer and Manto the man were
 139

ideological opposites with respect to their views on gender. Whereas Manto

the writer wrote about women who had been sexually humiliated, seduced,
dominated, raped, made pregnant, abandoned, prostituted, or murdered, Ispa-
hani contends, Manto the man was "conservative, almost reactionary in his
personal views about education for women, about their presence among men
in society" (op. cit., 186, 187).
7 Rajan, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism,
London: Routledge, 1993, p. 72.
8 Quoted in Fleming, Another Lonely Voice, p. 32.
9 In Part 2 of their book, entitled "The Rhetoric of Elision", Higgins and Silver
collect essays that "focus on how rape can be read in its absence". They hold
that the elision of the scene of violence in male texts about rape "ironically
both emphasizes the origins of the violence and suggests the possibility of
making it visible again. In addition, [such] texts reveal, however unconsciously,
the ambivalence of the male author caught up in representations of masculinity
and subjectivity that he may question, but that he ultimately leaves in place."
Higgins and Silver, eds., Rape and Representation, New York: Columbia UP,
1991, pp. 5, 6.
10 Einhorn, "Introduction", Women’s Studies International Forum, 19, 1-2
(1996), 2.
11 Fleming, Another Lonely Voice, p. 77; quoted in Fleming, op. cit., p. 78.
12 Likening Manto to Guy de Maupassant, Mahnaz Ispahani points to his "almost
journalistic naturalism ... epiphanous passages about alienation and sexual
violence, ... [and] blighted endings" (op. cit., 184), once more neglecting to
investigate the burden on women of such "naturalism", "sexual violence",
"alienation" and "blighted endings".
13 Fleming, "Riots and Refugees", p. 105; and Fleming, Another Lonely Voice,
p. 80.
14 "Rereading rape" in this fashion involves "more than listening to silences",
Higgins and Silver point out; "it requires restoring rape to the literal, to the
body: restoring, that is, the violence - the physical, sexual violation. The insist-
ence on taking rape literally often necessitates a conscious critical act of reading
the violence and the sexuality back into texts where it has been deflected, either
by the text itself or by the critics: where it has been turned into a metaphor
or a symbol or represented rhetorically as titillation, persuasion, ravishment,
seduction, desire...." Higgins and Silver, op. cit., p. 4.
or
15 Like Higgins and Silver’s emphasis on the subversive gap in male texts of rape,
Laura Tanner stresses the reader’s responsibility to counter the "seductive
power of representation" by "seeing into violence" and "uncovering not just
the vulnerability of the victim or the observer but the very power dynamics
upon which the violator’s force depends". "The power of the reader to resist ...
the ’force’ of the text often parallels, in the representation of intimate vio-
lence, the power of the reader to resist complicity - either through passive
viewing or unconscious participation - in the act of violation represented
therein," she concludes. Intimate Violence: Reading Rape and Torture in Twen-
tieth-Century Fiction, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994, pp. 10, 15-16.
16 Quoted in Fleming, Another Lonely Voice, p. 33.
17 Chatterjee, The National and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories,
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993, p. 13.
18 Mahasweta, op. cit., p. xvii.
19 Mahasweta, op. cit., p. xx. In this context, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan points out
140

that in India the vast majority of reported female rape cases are "instances of
what we might call institutional rape, rape perpetrated by members of repressive
state forces like the police or the army, or groups like landlords, upon helpless
women of the oppressed classes, often when the women are in custody in
police cells or bound by contracts of bonded labour.... Therefore rape as a
phenomenon in contemporary India is more properly understood as the
expression of (male) violence - sanctioned by various modes of social power -
rather than of sexual desire", Rajan, op. cit., p. 78.
20 Quoted in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural
Politics, New York: Routledge, 1988, p. 244; and Imaginary Maps, p. xx.
21 Spivak, "Woman in Difference", pp. 112-13.
22 Spivak, "Draupadi: Translator’s Foreword", Writing and Sexual Difference, ed.
Elizabeth Abel, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, pp. 268-9.
23 Mahasweta Devi, "Dhowli", Of Women, Outcastes, Peasants, and Rebels: A
Selection of Bengali Short Stories, ed. and trans. Kalpana Bardhan, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1990, pp. 191-2. All subsequent references to
this story are to this edition and are cited in the text. In a related comment,
Mahasweta notes chillingly in a conversation, "Decolonization has not reached
the poor... what we need is mass-based public opinion formation, pressure
on the government, vigilance when a woman is raped, the entire judiciary
...

system is against the woman" (Imaginary Maps, p. xx).

24 Writing about the gendered circumscription of women within Indian
nationalism, Partha Chatterjee points out that "the inverted ideological form
of the relation of power between the sexes: the adulation of woman as goddess
or as mother ... served to emphasize with all the force of mythological inspir-
ation what had in any case become a dominant characteristic of femininity in
the new construct of ’woman’ standing as a sign for ’nation,’ namely, the spiritual
qualities of self-sacrifice, benevolence, devotion, religiosity, and so on..." (op.
cit., pp. 130-31). Gayatri Spivak takes this point further, asserting that "the
ideological construct ’India’ is too deeply informed by the goddess-infested
reverse sexism of the Hindu majority. As long as there is this hegemonic cultural

self-representation of India as a goddess-mother (dissimulating the possibility

that this mother is a slave), she will collapse under the burden of the immense
expectations that such a self-representation permits" (In Other Worlds, p. 244).
It is well to remember too that such legendary mythological figures as Sita,
Draupadi and Ahilya, heroines of enduring "love" stories, while they are
revered as symbols of pativrata
, husband-worship, can also be seen as ideological
examples of the gendered oppressions of Hindu orthodoxy, as the dalit writer
Hira Bansode compellingly establishes in her poem entitled "Slave":
Where Sita entered the fire to prove her fidelity
Where Ahilya was turned to stone because of Indra’s lust
Where Draupadi was fractured to serve five husbands
In that country a woman is still a slave....
An Anthology of Dalit Literature (Poems), eds. Mulk Raj Anand and Eleanor
Zelliot, New Delhi: Gyan, 1992, p. 31.
For additional information on the myths of Sita, Draupadi and Ahilya, see

Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook, Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1975.
25 Key works that investigate feminist narrative theories and practices include
Abel, op. cit.; Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative
 141

Strategies of Twentieth Century Women Writers, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986;

Molly Hite, The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contem-
porary Feminist Narrative, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989; Diana Fuss, Essentially
Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference, New York: Routledge, 1989; and
Paulina Palmer, Contemporary Women’s Fiction: Narrative Practice and Feminist
Theory, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1989.
26 Mahasweta Devi, "The Funeral Wailer", Bardhan, op. cit., p. 228. All subsequent
references to this story are to this edition and are cited in the text.
27 Rajan, op. cit., pp. 76-7.
28 Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in
, Oxford: Blackwell, 1982; Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t:
Samuel Richardson
Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982; William Beatty
Warner, "Reading Rape: Marxist-Feminist Figurations of the Literal", diacritics
13, 4 (1983), 12-32; and Adrienne Rich, "Contemporary Heterosexuality and
Lesbian Existence", The "Signs" Reader: Women, Gender and Scholarship, eds.
Elizabeth Abel and Emily K. Abel, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983,
pp. 139-68. All quoted in Rajan, op. cit., p. 76.
29 Gayatri Chakravory Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dia-
logues, ed. Sarah Harasym, New York: Routledge, 1990, p. 1.