Obscene and Perverse Fictions: Saadat Hasan Manto and Censorship

Abstract

This paper aims to explore how Saadat Hasan Manto, (1912-1955) faced state censorship and social criticism on charges of obscenity and sedition for his stories. The present paper shall seek to trace the charges of obscenity that were laid in colonial India and Pakistan against these stories, in order to trace the national/cultural imaginary through which the nation states of British India and the newly formed state of Pakistan sought to define themselves, to attempt to identify precisely what was found to be threatening in these texts to merit state censorship. The paper asserts that a study of these censorship trials might throw an interesting light on how the South Asian state in its precolonial and then national form imagined itself into being by containing and censoring what was seen as inhospitable to the creation of the governable subject.

Keywords

• censorship
• obscenity
• sedition