Encountering the Strange Feminine: Failure of Partition and Masculine Hegemony in Saadat Hasan Manto’s ‘Colder Than Ice’ (‘Thanda Gosht’)

Fictional narratives centred around the Partition of India in 1947 usually voice the plight of the women caused by the communal riots and hatred among religious communities. Saadat Hasan Manto, in his short story 'Thanda Gosht' (trans. 'Cold Meat'), translated into English by Khalid Hasan as 'Colder than Ice', brings out the other side of Partition's gendered narrative – the impact of the violent creation of borders on Indian men. Through the notion of 'strange encounters', the paper demonstrates the metaphoric connection between the female body and the contested land of pre-Partition India while the masculine and oppressive Ishwar, who symbolises political leaders mandating the Partition, fails to exert his supremacy as he is traumatised by the psychological repercussions of the aftermath of violence- sexual on a micro level, communal on a macro level. By critiquing the familiarity and strangeness that underscore the Self-Other binary, the essay visualises alternate paradigms of gendered nationalist encounters- how the male communalist perpetrator's masculinity is a product of myriad privileges, his hegemonic power in a patriarchal system being one. It will also interrogate notions of shame and honour that pervade such gendered encounters underlined by violence to demonstrate how Manto's stories subvert that discourse.