Trauma in Prostitution: An Analysis of Select Short Stories of Sadat Hasan Manto and Kamala Surayya Das

Abstract

Prostitutes encountered and continue to experience a great deal of trauma related to their existence and profession—which is not even considered or recognised by society, especially in South Asian countries, even after the legalisation of prostitution—sex workers have no respect and place in society, and hardly any writer or radical thinkers have written about them. In the late 1990s, major figures in the movement for sex workers' rights openly questioned the queer theorists' silence on the matter of prostitution and sex work. Not much has been done to emphasise the expressly queer side of sex work, despite efforts made by sex workers to "come out of the closet" and engage with the larger queer theoretical community. The absence of any discussion of how sex functions in queer theory refutes the logical inference suggesting that it has no relevance to this area of research. Prostitution can also be referred to as queer profession because their lives are full of traumatic experiences. Only a small number of authors from South Asian nations have written or spoken about prostitution. Among them are Sadat Hasan Manto and Kamala Surayya Das, whose short stories “Insult” (Hatak), “The Hundred Candle Power Bulb”, “A Doll for a Child Prostitute,” and “Padmavati The Harlot” accurately, surreally, and impartially depict the life, surroundings, and struggle of sex workers. The most extended and most in-depth story in her collection of short stories, "A Doll for the Kid Prostitute," features an inspector sahib who has had enough of women and demands a fresh child recruit, Rukmani. The inspector pulled her dress and transformed her into a prostitute without even considering her age; the sentence, which solely described the inspector's conduct, was harsh. This made their first encounter painful. With this awful first encounter, Das creates a world of unrestrained carnality in which innocence must perish. The short novella emphasises the issue of prostitution and how it affects women. The stories of individuals like Sita, Meera, Laxmibai, her son, Saraswati, Krishna, etc. are very well portrayed, and they are all intriguing. Das regularly uses the dramatic approach and writes realistic stories. She expresses herself artistically primarily through discourse. Manto’s story "A Hundred Candle-Power Bulb" demonstrates how prostitution and division coexist because pimps are prepared to exchange their most important resource: prostitutes, even in the midst of riots between various ethnic groups.