Summary Of Lhaaf And Manto's Thanda Gosht

Both Chugtai and Manto, “enfants terribles” of Urdu literature wrote bold stories that challenged notions of gender and sexuality. Partners in crime as it were, both were tried for obscenity. This paper proposes to study the body as a space with a focus on gender, sexuality and power politics in Chugtai’s “Lihaaf” and Manto’s “Thanda Gosht”. While Chugtai deals with female sexuality , Manto focuses on predatory male sexuality which looks at a woman’s body as a space to be controlled and exploited through the act of rape and aggression. . Ismat Chugtai and Sadaat Hasan Manto hailed from the Progressive Writers’ Movement (PWM). Chugtai wrote during a period when India was a colony but the struggle for independence and with a change in the socio-cultural fabric a woman’s body and behaviour became associated with national and communal identity. Chugtai celebrates the body and a woman’s sexuality. Her story “Lihaaf”, set inside a Muslim “zenana” questions the physical and emotional disempowerment of women.
The period during which Manto wrote was the turbulent era of partition, fraught with religious and communal tensions resulting in the bifurcation of national politics. During the partition, the body of the woman was considered to represent the honour of the community they belonged to. Hundreds of women were abducted and sexually exploited during the migration of refugees from the two nations. The purpose behind sexually exploiting the woman was to exert the power of one