Revisiting Partition through Manto’s Short Stories, “A Tale of 1947” and “The Great Divide”

Abstract

The Partition was one of the most appalling and momentous events in Indian history. It entailed a saga of massacres and migrations, and an unfolding of human tragedies of enormous proportions.   The bloody riots led many creative writers to articulate their experiences with deep sensitivity which was reflected in what came to be known as “Partition Literature”. Saadat Hasan Manto, a prolific Indo-Pakistani Urdu writer portrayed rather starkly the event of Partition in his short stories. With his deep and instinctive insight into human nature, he penned many a story during the turbulent phase of the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947.  An attempt is made in the present paper to bring to fore certain interesting aspects of Manto’s writings by making a close reading of some of his short stories like “A Tale of 1947” and “The Great Divide”. It is evident that his works are profoundly concerned with the sense of isolation and absurdity, violence and evil that seized people during the partition. The paper will discuss the socio-political context of the two stories in trying to fathom whether Manto is a subversive writer in portraying only the mass hysteria and bestiality of communal violence of partition?