Men Have Been Obsessed with Women Since Adam and Eve

As part of the publication of the newest TWO LINES, we're featuring short essays by translators on the pieces they have in the new volume. Today we have Matt Reeck on the great Urdu writer Saadar Hasan Manto. Reeck co-translated Manto's story "Smell" for Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, the newest TWO LINES.

If you're intrigued by what you see, you can order Some Kind of Beautiful Signal directly from the Center right here, or on Amazon right here, or Indiebound right here.

When I first read Saadat Hasan Manto, his texts immediately resonated with me in two chief ways: their iconoclasm and their interest in the modern city. Both, I think, are signs of his idealism: though the city he reveled in was one of evident corruption, disease, and heartache, in this milieu he sensed a resilient human spirit side by side with examples of our worst nature.

His stories set in Bombay delve into that city's examples of social chaos. They have been viewed traditionally as realist bombshells (in pre-independence India and post-independence Pakistan he was put on trial five times for obscenity, each time acquitted), as the unvarnished truth, the real "fiction" of life and not a writer's half-cast spin-off.

This general reading encourages us to draw the common association between Manto and the Progressive Writers Movement, the most important literary movement in India during the middle of the 20th century. The PWM sought a new literature bent on social uplift for those degraded by the caste system, British imperialism and other institutionalized ills; it was meant to expose and reform in one fell swoop.

But Manto never considered himself a member of this movement, in which his closest literary friends were actively involved. In fact he found the debate over the meaning of the word "progressive" rather farcical. He said as much in an address to the students of Jogeshwari College, Bombay, on 1 Jan 1944:

The biggest confusion is about progressive literature, and yet this is unnecessary. Literature is just literature or it's not. A man is just a man or he's not. The same is true of a donkey, a house, a table or anything else. You could say that Saadat Hasan Manto is a progressive human; there's nothing nonsensical about that. Saadat Hasan Manto is a human, and every human should be progressive. When people refer to me as progressive, they don't implicate my style but rather prove their faults. I mean that they themselves aren't progressive—that they don't want to change. [my translation]

"Smell" was one story that warranted him a court-date. His apparent interest in sex (the story is focused on Randhir's comparative sexology) was too much for the authorities. He addressed the critics in the same speech:

People object that the only thing new writers write about is sex. For myself, all I'll say is that the subject interests me. Why? Just because. Ascribe it to perversion. But if you're smart you'll be able to trace out its causes. That is, the age we live in. If you're still unaware of the times, please read my stories. If you can't stand my stories, the reason is that the times are insufferable. Whatever faults I have are those of the times. [my translation]

For him the idea of modernity and the figure of the woman were linked:

But people have given this mentality the wrong name. Some call it progressive, some call it obscenity and some call it socialist. Some even say that these writers are obsessed with women. The truth of the matter is that men have been obsessed with women since Adam and Eve, and why not? What—should men be obsessed with elephants or horses? A male pigeon coos when he sees a female pigeon, so why shouldn't a man write a ghazal or a story when a woman inspires him? Women are much more interesting, pretty, and intelligent than pigeons. That goes without saying. [my translation]

Manto shouldn't be read as a strict realist; the lines above show that he fails to debunk the Romantic ideal of woman as Muse. While he did markedly shift the ideal of woman, introducing female characters from the fringes of society—prostitutes and the poor—who demonstrate a measure of independence and feistiness, his characters are nonetheless idealized and certain personality types are glorified. Our attention is trained on them not because of their documentary accuracy but in large part because of the fight of good and evil, of beauty and ugliness, that they dramatize.

So if the ghatin woman from "Smell" is a idealization of a type of woman, then for readers contemporary to Manto it was one ambiguous and unfamiliar—just like a foreign smell you're not quite sure whether to call a fragrance, a smell or an odor.