GENDER AND DISPLACEMENT

As we zoom in, we have a chance to examine the paths taken by the Male and Female characters in Manto’s collection of short stories called Mottled Dawn. Characters of different genders travel various distances to reach places supposed to be ‘safe’. But, the map doesn’t necessarily tell that story. The stories, just like routes, are not necessarily simple or direct. We can think about where did these characters come from and where do they go to?

PATH INTERACTIONS

As we zoom in further, we see where the author writes about incidents of conflict/violence and harmony on the characters’ paths. Manto’s stories are stories about partition, but they are also stories about people being betrayed in their new countries and old. Where do negative interactions occur more often on the paths? What do these stories say about negative interactions and positive ones in relation to the space its characters occupy? Does the character’s gender matter in where they are facing the conflict? Are the women in the story more likely to be involved in matters of harmony versus the men while on their migratory path? And what does thinking about these questions tell us about the event of partition itself?

MANTO'S ORIGINAL HOME

Manto lived a substantial part of his adult life in Bombay. It was a city he loved, so much so that he was once quoted saying, “I am a walking, talking Bombay”. He was forced to move out of the city during partition and that sadness, that betrayal formed a major emotional theme of his writing. So while we map how these characters move, there is another question that becomes important. The question of the author. Since Manto migrated from India to Pakistan, does he write about characters that migrate the same way? And does he write about characters going through conflict closer to their home towns or the towns they migrated to? Does where Manto was from play any role in how he writes? How does this now complicate the question of partition further?

MANTO'S MIGRATORY HOME

Manto moved from Bombay to Lahore during the partition. He moved there not out of choice.
As an article in The Guardian says, “Manto had been implacably opposed to partition and had refused to go to the newly formed Pakistan. One evening he was sitting drinking with his Hindu colleagues at the offices of the newspaper where he worked when one of them remarked that, were it not for the fact they were friends, he would have killed Manto. The next day Manto packed his bags and took his family to Lahore, and it was here that he wrote the stories that revisited the brutality and absurdities of partition.” (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/11/saadat-hasan-manto-short-stories-partition-pakistan)
Manto often wrote about partition from a human perspective, human evil, human betrayal - and perhaps the incidents in his life like the one above can help us understand why. Maybe they can help us see partition more in the light of how it affected individuals.

“Manto had been implacably opposed to partition and had refused to go to the newly formed Pakistan. One evening he was sitting drinking with his Hindu colleagues at the offices of the newspaper where he worked when one of them remarked that, were it not for the fact they were friends, he would have killed Manto. The next day Manto packed his bags and took his family to Lahore, and it was here that he wrote the stories that revisited the brutality and absurdities of partition.” (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/11/saadat-hasan-manto-short-stories-partition-pakistan)

OVERVIEW

This map wants to look at not only the fiction around partition, but the real-life character who went through partition and then wrote about partition, hoping to give the people who experience the map multiple layers (quite literally) to think through; and also an understanding that at the end of it, all the narratives we visualize are narratives - like in the event of partition, perhaps fact is not always easy to discern and maybe it really isn’t about the facts we discern but about what people felt, or thought they felt. Thus, here, the author’s imagination (their stories) and what we know about their life - come together to let the viewers experience partition as a composite of all these narratives , and derive their own questions about migration, gender, violence/conflict and harmony.