Beyond the Partition of India and Pakistan: An Insight into Sensory Studies in Saadat Hasan Manto’s Stories
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Abstract
This article examines the role of sensory perception in Saadat Hasan Manto’s short fiction, reading selected stories through the intersecting frameworks of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment and the interdisciplinary field of sensory studies. Working primarily with Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of the lived body and the phenomenal field, and drawing additionally on David Howes and Constance Classen’s cultural anthropology of the senses, Ralf Hertel’s argument that literary texts function as technologies of sensation, and affect theory as developed by Sara Ahmed and Ann Cvetkovich, the article proposes that Manto’s sensory language constitutes a formal system through which the violence of Partition and colonial modernity is registered at the level of the body’s most intimate perceptual capacities. Close readings of six stories—Odour (Bu), Wet Afternoon, A Room with Bright Light, Colder than Ice, Mozail, and The Return—attend to olfactory, tactile, visual, and auditory dimensions of Manto’s prose, arguing that his sensory imagery is not incidental atmosphere but a purposive narrative and epistemological instrument. The article contributes to the growing intersection of sensory studies and postcolonial literary criticism and offers a model for reading Urdu fiction through embodied experience.
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