Stylistic analysis:
Setting:
This story is written in sub-continent, after partition of India.
Plot:
This story has linear plot. All the events are sets in series of order and this story has proper beginning, middle and end. The important parts of the plot are follows:
Introduction:
In the story ‘The girl from Delhi’ the girl Nasim Akhtar is a Muslim and her source of income is singing and dancing. She also effected from this mishap of partition. She wants to migrate but her mother opinion is different. Aachen khan who is a pimp he took her to Pakistan. When they reached the girl named Nasim Akhtar is totally changed she wants to spend a noble life now. But the society is very hash. She couldn’t live her life according to her own desires.
Rising of action:
Rise of action stars when she left Delhi.
Climax:
The story reached on climax when she got married.
Falling of action:
Fall of action starts when she came to know that her marriage was a game. The woman was so bad. She sells her. And she decided to go back in that filthy area called HIRA MANDI.
Characters:
All are flat characters in this story.
Narration:
The narrator of this story is selective omniscient.
Conclusion:
The story has chronological order. Whole plot of the story has properly designed. This story is all about females. At the time of partition they suffered a lot
Thematic analysis:
Sadat hasan Manto was a great Urdu short story writer of south Asia as he said after the partition of India “I used to be the great short story writer of India’s. Now I am Pakistan’s great short story writer”.
Manto is known for his broken heart – he never recovered from partition and the blood of that division ran raw and red through him for the rest of his life.
Manto's works are politically relevant and insightful today. And as different scholar’s points out, "Manto is a living history, a cultural reference for the Indian sub-continent. What Chekhov is to Russian literature or what Maupassant is to French literature, Manto is to Pakistani/Indian literature.
He was a short story writer, scrip-writer, editor and translator.
He discussed socially tabooed issue. He was charged for vulgarity because he wrote about social issues his main focus was on male female relationship and sex.
There seems to be no rest for the poor soul of Saadat Hassan Manto. While he was alive the conservatives held him in abuse for advocating women's freedom. Now, in the so-called post-feminist age of literary criticism he seems to have become a popular target for energetic novices of criticism who see him as one who objectified women and portrayed them as sex toys. In many of his stories, Manto depicted woman as the main character. He brought to the reader how a woman is exploited and used by men for their individual satisfaction. In some of his stories, Manto referred to poor young girls who had horrifying experiences during partition of India in 1947, and as each one of such stories is a ‘document’ and not just fiction.
this story also contain the same issue that women were treated as a sex toy since 60’s.they were not free to enjoy their lives according to their own desires.There is no difficult wording in this story. The language which is used is very simple and easily understandable. This story has been written at the time of partition. It affects all the people either Muslims or Hindus.
The girl Nasim Akhtar is a Muslim and her source of income is singing and dancing.
She also effected from this mishap of partition. She wants to migrate but her mother opinion is different.
Achan khan who is a pimp he take Nasim Akhtar’s side but he has to obey her mother as she is elder among them and have the power to take decision.
But at the time when the girl came to know that her mother wants to sell her she ran away along with Achan khan and they came to Pakistan.
When they reached Achan khan wanted to continue their business but the girl become totally changed. She wants to spend a noble life. She wants to spend her life according to her own desires as a girl wants.
But the society can’t leave her. The woman who came in her life as an angel was a devil. She was going to arrange her marriage but she sell her in a pimp hands and that pimp again fixing her price with some other persons. At the end the girl give up and she came back to Hira Mandi.
Feminism is a new philosophy. it didn't come in vogue until the 1960's and there is no unanimously agreed definition except that a feminist view point emerges out of (a) one's awareness that patriarchal systems exploit women through numerous institutions, and (b) one's willingness to do something to improve the entire system. A true feminist activism would not seek solutions for individual women but would rather focus on changing the system that is the source of problems. Hence the feminist slogan, the personal is the political. This awareness and activism is feminism, whether it is left wing (based on socialist analysis of exploitation) or mainstream right wing (seeking redress through liberal democratic measures.)
It doesn’t mean that there was no feminist awareness before the 1960's. Mary Wollstonecraft lived in the heyday of eighteenth century romanticism, J.S. mill and Fredrick Engel, the two fathers of feminism both lived in the nineteenth century and Simon de Beauvoir’s second sex was first published in 1949. Also, there was the suffragist activism of the first wave feminism. these and a few others serve as examples of a feminist vision in the pre-feminist times, and it is safe to assume that some of those people had a very different concept about their own philosophies than we have about them today. What makes them a feminist in retrospect is their stand for the unconditional freedom of women.
There were others, less radical advocates of women's freedom. They proposed conditional freedom for women within the existing patriarchies. Today we see their point of view as a sort of utilitarian feminism (technically called "eugenic feminism" by some scholars). This was awareness that women are not allowed to participate in the overall welfare of the society and therefore they should be educated and given better opportunity. In our own recent history we can quote the works of such authors like Deputy Nazir Ahmed, Hali and Syed Imtiaz ali to illustrate this view point. However, this sort of utilitarian feminism did not question the larger patriarchal system and therefore advised women to accept it with a few improvements in their role. In other words, the eugenic feminists wanted women to get better educated so that they could better serve the patriarchy.
When we come to Manto, we find him half-way between this eugenic feminism and left wing socialist feminism. As a student of socialism he recognizes the exploitative institutions of the society and raises fundamental questions about the moral and ethical values regulating the lives of women. but just when we expect him to come out as an advocate of unconditional freedom he takes an about turn and betrays his own utilitarian longings for women as men's favorite sex toys. This in my view is a fair assessment of his position in respect of women, and i would now like to elaborate on this.
The complete works of Manto remain uncollected to date but even the easily available canon extends to no less than a few hundred short stories and plays. This is a huge mass of work to analyze and the easiest way to begin is by categorizing his female characters into three broad prototypes. The girl, the homemaker (house wife in sexist language), the commercial sex worker (prostitute in sexist language) and same as in this story the girl from Delhi.
The third prototype, the commercial sex worker, is Manto's favorite subject. He is the first storywriter in Urdu to portray her at a human level. His basic pretext on this issue is essentially socialist. The prostitute is just a worker who earns her livelihood in a free economy. It is wrong to assume that the prostitute is a promoter of immorality. She only provides an outlet, just as the sweeper doesn’t create the filth but only takes it away. However, the sex worker is often underpaid and perhaps the only kind who doesn’t get any respect for her contribution to the
Manto was a man and that’s why on writing a female he couldn’t grasp the whole mentality of women although he talks about more on women rights but somewhere his writings didn’t portrait the true image of women.
Manto said to his puritan enemies: "I don’t mind if you hit me with a stone. All I am asking of you is to throw it in style!"
new thoughts by a youngster for pakistan
