Recapturing the Trauma of Partition of India: A Reading of Manto's Short Stories

Abstract

The partition history of India carries the traumatic experience of sectarian violence which even has been the indigenous phenomenon of India. Independence brought with it the trauma of the country's partition which made millions homeless and brought in calculable misery in its wake. As several creative writers who move round on the literary battlefield of partition, Saadat Hasan Manto's stories also deal with psychosis of divisiveness, of dismembering, the rupture with the past and unprecedented violence of absurd dimensions,trauma and even death. Besides depicting the deep pangs of partition, Manto brought to the forefront the lasting unspeakable psychic pain of the sufferers' to the present as 'trauma'.Be they the characters of" She is Alive","A Lump of Cold Flesh","The Last Solute"or "Three and a Half Annas", the life of the sufferers' portrayed by Man to leaves one shocked and scattered. Not even the Indo-Pak conflict on Kashmir escaped the master's attention. "The Last Solute", "Toba Tek Singh", are his tribute to the comradeship between the Indian and Pak armed forces of those days and the long-lasting haunting images of these episodes are the outcome of the psychic trauma.