When to “Open It” Only Meant Untying the Pyjama Strings: Partition and Narrativity Gone Astray

My paper studies how brevity manifested itself through a complete breakdown of language system in reaction to the animosity circumscribing the Partition of India. I look into Sadaat Hasan Manto’s selected Urdu short stories to demonstrate how the pared off pattern of writing coupled with creation of specific information lapses helps to project hostility in its denuded form. The dark side of language emerges through minimum clarification, where the unedited picture of gruesome carnage becomes the lone guarantor of informal accounts, generating perspectives that had hitherto been rebuffed by the selective versions of mainstream history. Through his economization of words, Manto unfolds trauma in its glaring intensity that had permanently balked the smooth programming of articulation. The slippage in meaning transpires through a distorted relationship between the signifying word and its concomitant silent gesture. His writing suggests a mechanical responding quality that directly hits the libidinous components of massacre, thereby making it impossible to naturalize blind communalist violence. I argue that by paradoxically juxtaposing emotion and language with action, the terseness and often comic treatment of the gory sights in Manto’s writings enable an empowerment of vision for the readers, thereby deliberately heightening the unguarded shocking impact